Protectionist racket.

• Author: Lindsey, Brink

As if the North American Free Trade Agreement didn't have enough enemies already--Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, the AFL-CIO, Greenpeace, and most congressional Democrats for starters--now some free-traders are turning hostile. Specifically, in late August two free-market organizations--the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Ludwig von Mises Institute--came out in opposition to NAFTA. The plot thickens: They made their announcement at a NAFTA-bashing press conference starring--are you ready?--protectionist/nativist Pat Buchanan and former Customs commissioner/drug war Dr. Strangelove William von Raab. What's a nice idea like free trade doing in a place like that?

Actually, there's plenty in NAFTA to make a free-trader uneasy. To begin with, the whole idea of negotiated trade agreements is mercantilist in conception. In trade negotiations we will only "give up" our trade barriers (no matter how misguided or harmful to our economy they may be) in exchange for similar "concessions" by other countries. The implication is that opening our markets is the price we pay to gain better access to markets abroad. That "exports good, imports bad" premise is at the heart of the mercantilist worldview; any good free-trader knows that open markets are their own reward, regardless of what is going on in other countries.

I have argued, in these pages (see "Reciprocity for Disaster," August/September 1991) and elsewhere, that for both theoretical and practical reasons a strategy of unilateral liberalization is generally preferable to trade negotiations. Pursuing open markets strictly as a matter of national economic policy is clearly sound in theory. Practically, it has the advantage of putting the focus of policy debate where it belongs: not on whether policies and conditions abroad are to our liking, but on whether the particular U.S. industries receiving or requesting import protection deserve special treatment at the expense of the rest of us. Furthermore, the example of the United States actually taking its own rhetoric seriously and opening its markets would do more to encourage freer trade abroad than any negotiations ever could.

Whatever my druthers, though, unilateral free trade is not exactly a happening political movement in this country. The cause of free trade, for the foreseeable future at least, rests entirely on the fate of trade negotiations: the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks and, of course, NAFTA.

If those...