-- Posted Friday, 18 May 2012 | | Disqus

[In the Rick’s Picks forum, where he is a regular contributor, Mark Uzick is a stickler for getting definitions right, especially when it is libertarian ideas that are under discussion. He describes himself as someone who hates to write but loves to argue. In the guest essay below, he overcomes his distaste for the former to mount a spirited defense of economic freedom, which unfortunately has never been more desperately in need of friends. RA]

Of all the depredations of economic interventionism, one of the most disturbing is protectionism, which is nothing less than a declaration of war on life and liberty. When trading partners are treated as adversaries or exploiters, the next steps are inevitably envy, xenophobia, threats and violent conflict.

When someone says, “There’s not enough wealth to go around,”what he really means is, “There’s not enough wealth to be looted.” That’s especially the case when wealth creators are treated as marginally tolerable misfits and criminals; wealth doesn’t “go around” – it’s created and it belongs to those who create it to be traded for other forms of wealth from other creators.

Some people confuse wealth with resources: Resources are only of value to those who put them to creative/productive use. Our society has little use for creative/productive people or enterprises, viewing them as exploiters/parasites of the poor and ruling classes; whenever possible, we make sure that resources are put off-limits to these “evildoers” – these “exploiters of the environment.” In their Malthusian wisdom they believe that we were robbed of our wealth and resources by nations emerging from tyranny and moving toward market based reform – that their liberty equals our enslavement and that their creativity/productivity equals our destitution. But this is a perverse perspective because: If we all are free, then there is not only competition for scarce resources, but competition to see who can create the greatest amount of wealth from a given amount of resources, thereby making resources both more valuable and more abundant; and trade between nations a way to multiply wealth as the various forms of wealth production are moved to where they each have the greatest marginal utility.

China Has Saved Us

A big complaint of the protectionists is that the American manufacturing base has been “Shanghaied” to China; but the transfer of the American manufacturing base is the life-line that has allowed American businesses and Americans’ productivity and prosperity to survive in the face of the criminalization of business activity, private property and domestic trade in the new socialist American empire. What good does it do to propose that we fight the results of domestic socialism with more comprehensive international socialism, never thinking to question socialism, but always ready to blame free trade?

That other countries engage in protectionism to enrich the oligarchs is a problem for the people of those countries to solve through the gradual process of liberalization; there’s certainly no reason to emulate them.  But if we care about our liberty and prosperity, we need to liberate ourselves from the stranglehold of socialism on both domestic and international trade, becoming, once more, a living example for the rest of the world to emulate. Competition and trade are mutually beneficial things; our prosperity does not come from trampling the hopes and dreams of others no matter how much relative power and status that some think that will give us. A free America will out-compete any oligarch ridden society, no matter how cheap their labor is kept or how hard they’re whipped to work faster (The belief that slave labor is more productive than free men would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.); and in so doing, will earn respect and friendship, becoming the template for world-wide reform.

***

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-- Posted Friday, 18 May 2012 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com

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