Occam's Banana
01-10-2014, 12:31 PM
POLL:
- vote for "'managed trade' is a good thing" if you think such agreements are good things in and of themselves (or even just good "on net")
- vote for "'managed trade' is a bad thing" if you think such agreements are bad things in and of themselves (or even just bad "on net")
- vote for "neutral / don't care" if you think that the good & bad aspects of such agreements cancel out (or if you don't think the issue is important)
- vote for "not sure / don't know" if, for whatever reason, you haven't settled on any of the above opinions or positions on the issue
FTA (emphasis mine): http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/produce-and-nafta/
Produce and NAFTA
This month is the 20th anniversary of NAFTA. A story on NPR (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/09/260790888/the-fruits-of-free-trade-how-nafta-revamped-the-american-diet) yesterday talks about how Americans have more produce because of NAFTA:
Walk through the produce section of your supermarket and you’ll see things you’d never have seen years ago — like fresh raspberries or green beans in the dead of winter. Much of that produce comes from Mexico, and it’s the result of the North American Free Trade Agreement — NAFTA — which took effect 20 years ago this month. In the years since, NAFTA radically changed the way we get our fruits and vegetables. For starters, the volume of produce from Mexico to the U.S. has tripled since 1994.
Could Americans have gotten more produce without NAFTA? Of course. It is called free trade, which NAFTA is not. A free trade agreement takes a paragraph, not hundreds of pages. For further reading, here (http://mises.org/Econsense/ch87.asp) is a great analysis of NAFTA by Murray Rothbard, here (http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/managed-trade-free-trade/) is my article “Managed Trade Is Not Free Trade,” and here (http://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/02/laurence-m-vance/the-moral-case-for-free-trade/) is my article “The Moral Case for Free Trade.” The Mises Institute (http://mises.org/) once put out The NAFTA Reader, but I am unable to locate it.
The notion that we should be thankful for NAFTA because more (varieties of) items are available than otherwise would have been is absurd. The only reason for the expanded availability of such items (under "managed trade" agreements such as NAFTA) is the prior imposition of trade restrictions upon those items in the first place!
NAFTA, CAFTA, etc. are all instances of "two steps backward, one step forward." And even the "step forward" part is more than a little dubious, given that it comes in the form of so-called "managed trade" (NOT free trade) - with all its attendant oppourtunities for bureaucratic jobbery, rent-seeking cronyism, and curtailments of national sovereignty.
Free trade requires the elimination of trade barriers - NOT the "management" of them ...
- vote for "'managed trade' is a good thing" if you think such agreements are good things in and of themselves (or even just good "on net")
- vote for "'managed trade' is a bad thing" if you think such agreements are bad things in and of themselves (or even just bad "on net")
- vote for "neutral / don't care" if you think that the good & bad aspects of such agreements cancel out (or if you don't think the issue is important)
- vote for "not sure / don't know" if, for whatever reason, you haven't settled on any of the above opinions or positions on the issue
FTA (emphasis mine): http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/produce-and-nafta/
Produce and NAFTA
This month is the 20th anniversary of NAFTA. A story on NPR (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/09/260790888/the-fruits-of-free-trade-how-nafta-revamped-the-american-diet) yesterday talks about how Americans have more produce because of NAFTA:
Walk through the produce section of your supermarket and you’ll see things you’d never have seen years ago — like fresh raspberries or green beans in the dead of winter. Much of that produce comes from Mexico, and it’s the result of the North American Free Trade Agreement — NAFTA — which took effect 20 years ago this month. In the years since, NAFTA radically changed the way we get our fruits and vegetables. For starters, the volume of produce from Mexico to the U.S. has tripled since 1994.
Could Americans have gotten more produce without NAFTA? Of course. It is called free trade, which NAFTA is not. A free trade agreement takes a paragraph, not hundreds of pages. For further reading, here (http://mises.org/Econsense/ch87.asp) is a great analysis of NAFTA by Murray Rothbard, here (http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/managed-trade-free-trade/) is my article “Managed Trade Is Not Free Trade,” and here (http://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/02/laurence-m-vance/the-moral-case-for-free-trade/) is my article “The Moral Case for Free Trade.” The Mises Institute (http://mises.org/) once put out The NAFTA Reader, but I am unable to locate it.
The notion that we should be thankful for NAFTA because more (varieties of) items are available than otherwise would have been is absurd. The only reason for the expanded availability of such items (under "managed trade" agreements such as NAFTA) is the prior imposition of trade restrictions upon those items in the first place!
NAFTA, CAFTA, etc. are all instances of "two steps backward, one step forward." And even the "step forward" part is more than a little dubious, given that it comes in the form of so-called "managed trade" (NOT free trade) - with all its attendant oppourtunities for bureaucratic jobbery, rent-seeking cronyism, and curtailments of national sovereignty.
Free trade requires the elimination of trade barriers - NOT the "management" of them ...