On Corn Laws, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws

On Marx the free marketeer (discussing the repeal of the Corn Laws, no less!) , see http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm#marx

Maybe I can’t do html to save my life, but i can sing all the verses of “Solidarity, Forever!”. And bake a mean rosemary focaccia. So there.

Gee, grampaw, be careful with the way you throw around that ill-defined term “encumberance”, or people might start thinking you sound a lot like a certain well known free market advocate….

Doubtless, if the price of all commodities falls — and this is the necessary consequence of free trade — I can buy far more for a franc than before. And the worker’s france is as good as any other man’s. Therefore, free trade will be very advantageous to the worker. There is only little difficulty in this, namely, that the worker, before he exchanges his franc for other commodities, has first exchanged his labor with the capitalist. If in this exchange he always received the said franc for the same labor and the price of all other commodities fell, he would always be the gainer by such a bargain. The difficult point does not lie in proving that, if the price of all commodities falls, I will get more commodities for the same money….
When less expense is required to set in motion the machine which produces commodities, the things necessary for the maintenance of this machine, called a worker, will also cost less. If all commodities are cheaper, labor, which is a commodity too, will also fall in price, and, as we shall see later, this commodity, labor, will fall far lower in proportion than the other commodities. If the worker still pins his faith to the arguments of the economists, he will find that the franc has melted away in his pocket, and that he has only 5 sous left.

Is this perhaps what you were referring to by the importance of trade “avoiding incumberances imposed by the wealthy upon the poor”? Because if so, all I can say is Welcome, Comrade! And the next council meeting’s at my place, six o’clock this Saturday. Be sure to bring a covered dish.

Now, now. Don’t say that. He’s smarter than us; after all, he reads The Economist… which even Brad Delong thinks is increasingly sucky. But then it hires Randroid/Libertarian nutjobs like Jane Galt, so of course grampaw finds it amenable.

Whoever upthread said that neoliberalism is basically libertarianism is exactly right. Hari’s link says as much. I’ve thought it for years — and it’s why people like DeLong have so many good things to say about that Pinochet-loving goon Uncle Miltie. Which, by the way, did anyone catch Dr. DeLong’s hilarious “distinction” between liberal authoritarianism and authoritarian liberalism? Bwahaha. All just to spear Hayek and spare Friedman when both were two peas in a pod, not so much caring about ‘freedom” as free markets, the both of them prefering the Chinese/Singaporean/Chilean model of governance to, say, a genuinely free social democracy like Sweden — cane me, death squad me, hang me for smoking dope so long as I get the freedom to run sweatshops and enjoy lower tax rates.

My international trade idea is that nations should exchange goods and services without encumberance (and that includes encumberencance imposed by the wealthy upon the poor….)

Is your pie-in-the-sky, just-wishing-can-make-it-so bullshit whose resemblance to an idea is purely accidental. Trade is NEVER free and unencumbered, else prices would be up across the board for anything and everything. Free and unencumbered trade means you an charge whatever the market will bear, as opposed to keep prices down in terms of manufacturing. Especially when you can’t just run to another producer to get the raw good cheaper. Oil cartels, diamond cartels, (potentially) sugar cartels or cocoa cartels, can freeze a feisty client out of the game entirely, close off whole markets. Retaliation in the form of economic pressure (free and unfettered, right? not free and militarily enforced) would spiral right out of control. (You won’t let us sell our cocoa there? Fine, you can’t sell you cars/iPods/RAZRs here.)

In order to get to free and unencumbered (I notice you don’t say anything about fair) trade, you have to be prepared to accept whatever terms/conditions/demands the producing country demands, if you as the consuming country want it bad enough.

Go back as far as you want, to barter based economies, and you will find that there were rules for trade. Rules that forbade the excesses that could damage or cripple the economy. They exist for a reason, if you don’t quite get why that is.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000556.html

Doesn’t it bother you that while you righteously cite your links to “economic platforms and protocols” other than free trade, you still can’t provide a nice succinct summary of any of them?

My international trade idea is that nations should exchange goods and services without encumberance (and that includes encumberencance imposed by the wealthy upon the poor, which encumberance, as I have stated time and again, is part of what I believe to be the problem with the IMF and, to a lesser extent, the WTO).

What is your international trade idea?

You know, like a jam-faced four-year-old blaming the mess in the kitchen on “the bad bear”. I still can’t decide which is scarier: That a putative adult nominally in charge of our great nation might think that we’d believe him when he blames all his crimes on invisible pixeys and flying monkeys from the political opposition? Or the increasing strong possibility that the C-Plus Augustus actually believes all the carnage and chaos done by his minions at his orders is somehow Not His Fault?

What bothers me about NAFTA is that on the surface it seems to be a fair agreement- unilateral trade between nations- that would hopefully (to my mind) strengthen Mexicos economy. In fact, after being there, I would personally take a cut in my own standard of living in order to raise theirs.

And this is the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that nobody’s willing to mention.

Oh, and since we’ve already gone over the similarities in content between the free-marketers and the war profiteers, it’s worth it to take a minute to point out their formal similarities…..

Bitch all you want, Retardo, just don’t expect anyone to put your team in charge of trade until you’ve got an actual plan, or even the basis of a plan.

See, if you point out that some other people have shit the bed, it now becomes your responsibility to somehow unshit the bed.

Sound familiar?

Don’t bother. I spent quite a while responding to Grampaw’s querulosities–pointed him right to some economic platforms and protocols. He couldn’t be bothered to follow the links. He’ll waste as much time as you’re willing to give him.

Ahhh, that’s an adorable little straw man — did you build it yourself?

See, there is no such thing as free and unfettered trade, as your own comments admit. The only question is whose ebenefit is the trade managed for? In theory it should be for everyone, but in the real world, that isn;t going to be possible. So if trade is going to be managed, big bad unserious lefties think it should be managed for the benefit of workers. In other words, trade agreeements should not be set up which country alows its workers to be screwed the most as the basis of competition.

Such trade gareements, of course, will not come in one size fits all trappings, because the world is a complex place, so they don’t come ready made with sound bites and cheap slogans, like you have. But their essence is simple: make sure labor is rewarded before capital.

I also wanted to contest what someone upthread said about these people, that they are conservatives without the xenophobia. Some of you may not remember but some of these people have advocated pretty drastic genocidal policies in the Middle East (Friedman Friedman Friedman) and I would rather say that many of them (but not all – e.g., I definitely would NOT include DeLong here and I have been reading him for years) are quite comfortable with what is in fact a neocolonial attitude towards third world countries and towards resource-rich regions like the Middle East. Basically, wage war and subjugate people in order to have unfettered access to those resources (but politely refrain from dwelling on this subjugation, or paint it as a sort of positive thing, as the French did with their mission civilatrice). This is what Britain did in its colonial heyday although it was able to exploit military advantages and we can’t really do that (the advantages are fewer, unless we do something really awful, and we can’t rely on the distance to hide war crimes like they did).

I don’t mind some thoughtful conservative people who want to increase trade and lower trade barriers but will at least have a conversation about some of the human cost and how it can be avoided rather than exacerbated. A good example would be Collounsbury of the Aqoul site who calls the current American conservatives “Bolshevik Rightists” but would also sneer at knee-jerk anti-trade attitudes of “the left” – yet if a “leftist” like me avoids the buzz words and the emotionalism you can get into the details of this stuff. For example, he recently did a post on Aqoul referring to the need in the UAE to raise labor standards – and he is a right winger – because he knows that it is in the long term a good thing for trade in the region.

Which brings me to my final point: The problem I have with economic neoliberals is that their main (only) focus seems to be on near-future growth and they don’t think in the long term (if they did, many of the policies they find attractive would become markedly less so). I don’t think economics as a science is going to do much to make the world a better place until people take a longer-term view to the wisdom of spending here and not spending here and saving some money on deregulation now that will cause birth defects or whatever for generations to come.

… by allowing the [Nazi] issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust’s more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

Ezra’s Greatest Centrist Hits were lost when Pandagon lost their archives a few years ago. But hell, he was on the “let’s put a dictatorial strongman back in charge” idea way before Chait brought it up the other day. It was way back when Allawi was accused of personally executing several supposed insurgents, and Ezra mulled over the possibility that maybe an ass-kicking sumbitch like that, unafraid to get his hands bloody, was what those anarchic people needed, at least for a little while. He used to feel a responsibility to shoulder the white man’s burden, no matter how many times people tried to suggest that perhaps meddling Westerners from think tanks and campuses dreaming up insane schemes for how other people should live were the actual problem itself, and not any sort of solution. The one-two punch of reading Pollack’s The Gathering Storm plus the specter of dirty unserious hippies was what convinced him to support the invasion to begin with. And on and on.

Like Retardo said, he’s changed since then, but I don’t think I’ll ever trust his instincts no matter what. I’m just waiting for his inner Beinart to come out again at some point.

Or is this just a list of folks you disagree with?

This is a list of people who oppose restricting imports to protect domestic business, particularly in the agricultural sector. I won’t call them “free traders” because Yglesias, for one, has written well on how many agreements made in the name of free trade have really been about imposing intellectual property policy on developing countries than opening up the exchange of goods and services. Retardo is conflating anti-protectionism with support for the Iraq war and a general Lieberman-esque disloyalty to the party.