There are regular diaries here on the evils of free trade and calls to abandon our current trade policies and pursue something more fair in our trade relationships. But twelve years after the protests against the WTO in Seattle that really brought opposition to free trade to the fore, I have yet to see an alternative trade policy that’s been thoroughly thought out and detailed, a plan for a new policy direction that goes beyond vague directives to be more fair. Is there an alternative trade policy out there that some brilliant policy expert has laid out? If there isn’t, why isn’t there one?
I’ll be up front, my policy preferences tend to run to the side of liberalizing trade. However, I’m not looking for a debate on the relative merits of free trade. What I’m wondering is if there is another way, a comprehensive trade policy that would hold up both in theory and in practice that could raise national wealth and well being and distribute that wealth more equitably.
Few people here believe that completely free trade is the best policy, but also very few would say a complete ban on trade is the best policy (just ask the Cubans what they think). So there must be a sweet spot in the middle where some arrangement of trade barriers would provide the best possible set of circumstances for the country as a whole. Not too high as to completely restrict trade, but not so low as to have no effect.
However, every time I find an article professing to have an alternative to free trade, it winds up being a screed against free trade for about 90% of the article, then ends with a limp call for a new trading system, without offering specifics. Opposition to free trade isn’t an alternative. Free trade is the absence of trade barriers, so if you want to abandon free trade, you have to replace it with something else, something concrete.
There have been some half-hearted efforts out there to come up with policy alternatives.
There’s fair trade, which gives you the opportunity to pay a premium on products like coffee to help poor farmers in developing countries earn better wages. However, fair trade with developing countries doesn’t help American workers or raise their wages. I’ve also never seen a serious proposal on how to extend fair trade to all products imported from all our trading partners.
There’s also the TRADE Act, which if passed would tweak our current and future free trade agreements and require the addition or withdrawal of certain provisions to make the agreements more fair. The Act would have no impact on trade with countries with which we don’t have free trade agreements, like China, and probably wouldn’t change too much with the ones where we do. The Congressmen who drafted this bill obviously had a number of staff working hard on it, so why didn’t they draft a trade policy for our entire trade relationship?
Why is this? Why is there no comprehensive alternative trade policy reflecting thorough research that sets out just which trade barriers are best, where the barriers should be, how high, how to implement them, and anticipates and prepares for any unintended side effects that the barriers might create? Is it because it’s just so difficult and no one can figure it out? Or are anti-free trade activists just hoping someone else will do it?
I’m sure someone’s got a sure-fire ten point plan that fits on half a page, but that’s not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is a well thought out policy with all the details and research that can be examined and tested. Is anyone else looking for that?