Free Trade and Slave Trade
A reader with the Homeric yet free-spoken name of Thersites remarks:
“Free trade is wonderful- with allied nations whose workers enjoy a roughly comparable standard of living. But when “muh capitalism” becomes an excuse for swapping out free and independent workers for third-world slave labour, whilst simultaneously placating the newly-unemployed by drugging them to the gills with cheap opiates, it comes to deserve the contempt so often heaped upon it.”
Agreed.
We have seen scientists glamorize science so that policies and propositions clearly out of their realm are asserted to be in their jurisdiction. The same is true of economists. They become fools when they swim outside the depth of their side of the pool.
It is easier to see with scientists. For example, Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, which appeared on PBS in my youth, where, without a blush, the rocket scientist held forth on all matters from history to philosophy, and simply did not know what he was talking about.
Sagan’s account of the death of Hypatia of Alexandria, for example, is gross anticlerical propaganda worthy of Stalin’s PRAVDA. (It is galling that typing Hypatia’s name into Google retrieves nothing but propaganda of the same low degree. One must page through many results before finding an account of the real controversy agitating the mob that slew her. Sagan’s legacy lives on.)
Likewise, Sagan’s praise for c-lister also-ran philosopher Democritus and his theory of atoms, and dispraise of a-list philosopher Plato is so shockingly one-sided and historically absurd as to linger in memory nearly half a century later.
The ontological implications of quantum mechanics, such as the question of the persistence of being in unobserved particles, likewise, are metaphysical and not physical, that is, not part of physics, and no expert in physics has any more or less a right to an opinion than a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker on the topic.
The question of whether the spin-value of one of a pair of quantum entangle particles exists while unobserved, at its root is no different from the question of whether the moon exists before moonrise while hidden below the horizon. The candlestick maker needs no special training nor education to hold forth on that matter.
So it is also with economics.
Economics by design only speaks to the economic implications of a policy or institution, not the political nor moral ramifications. Economics is the study of the invariant relations that obtain regarding the deliberate exchanges of goods and services in a world of scarcity.
An economist can tell you, for example, everything else being equal, that if efficiencies in factory production create an increase of the supply of shoes or roof-shingles or sausages, that this will create an incentive to drive the price lower, and may put these things in the reach of the poor; but the same is also true of an increase of the supply of narcotics, pornography, contraceptives, or any other good or service, fair or foul.
Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage, which speaks of the fiscal benefits of lowering tariffs in order to take advantage of the specialization of labor across national boundaries, is not a political theory, and does not mention the non-fiscal aspects of such a policy, particularly those with military ramifications.
Ricardo’s theory is also an abstraction. By design the science of economics does not consider other aspect of human reality aside from the exchanges of goods and services, any more than physics is concerned with ontology, final cause, or any non-empirical aspect of material reality.
The idea of having free trade with a slave state is an oxymoron.
In effect, the slave state is extracting the value of the labor of its slaves by coercion, so that the slave takes a loss, and renders it to the free state in return for goods and services. The free state, thanks to the slave labor, gets the benefit of the bargain, at the expense of wage earners in the free state whose jobs are being shipped overseas.
Ricardo’s Theory, in its original form, does not contemplate where in the economy the costs and benefits fall, nor whom is advantaged nor in what degree. A workingman whose wage is more expensive than slave labor might, in theory, receive the benefit of the more cheaply made shoe or phone shipped from China, but if his wage is lowered, or vanishes altogether, the policy is not beneficial to him.
In sum, it is no different than if the private sector in the free state themselves kept slaves, or funded a fleet of pirate ships to raid shipping at sea: it is the mere opposite of an uncoerced and mutually beneficial exchange that is what free trade is.
When an economist holds forth on the benefits of free trade with a slave state, he speaks only of the economic benefit, the savings in money. What that cost is, and whether it is worth it, or even whether it is a matter of pragmatic assessment of cost and benefit at all, a politician, or, better yet, a statesman or sage, philosopher or prophet, has a better qualification to address.
In the same way twelve jurors selected by lottery are better qualified to address questions of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, than any panel of experts, in the question of free trade with slave states, any random twelve tradesmen, coal miners, whalers, truckers, lumberjacks, clerks, shopkeepers, beekeepers, or factory hands would be better qualified than a credentialed economist.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
