Author Archives: Alastair Bowman

Free markets liberated us from the overweening power of church and aristocracy and created a rights culture.  Emile Durkheim established back in 1893 the constitutional, commercial and civil law required to govern the society of strangers that capitalism creates.  Free markets empower people with a choice of where to buy, work and live, and vendors compete with lower prices right down the supply chain.  Free trade operates above our heads, regulating governments and giving capital the right to own, operate and profit, in markets that may be scarred by monopoly, corruption, slavery and child labour.  Free markets are democratising; free trade can entrench power, concentrate wealth, limit the scope of civil society, and undermine prospects for economic and political development.  With free trade, we are exporting the economics of capitalism while keeping the rights culture for ourselves.

When an African landowner chooses to export, the farm worker still has a job but the product of the local land, water and labour is shipped out of the country for the benefit of someone else.  With less food grown for local consumption, everyone faces higher prices.  In recompense, the landowner receives more profit.

Unless there is a labour shortage, there is no reason to expect higher profits to fund higher wages.  More likely, any hard currency is placed in foreign bank accounts, or spent on imported luxuries, or imported machinery to replace the labourers altogether.  Worst of all, the money could be used to buy guns.  Then people lose twice over from free trade, seeing the product of the local land, water and labour exported and the tools of their repression bought with the proceeds.

Free trade makes our imports cheaper but at the cost of our long-term security.  Moreover, it gives despots a competitive advantage because people without rights are cheaper to employ and easier to exploit.  Putting high tariffs on countries that restrict or abuse basic rights would help rich and poor democracies by cutting unfair competition.

Struggling democracies would be the first to benefit, but the captive populations could be the real winners.  Longer term, tariffs on tyrants would incentivise democracy and human rights instead of entrenching despotic wealth and power.  Near term, captive populations benefit from any switch to domestic demand needed to stem unemployment, which despots fear as destabilising and unprofitable.  If selling to the free is much harder, they will have to sell to the un-free, making them better off, consuming their own output with less profit for their abusers.  We, in turn, should use our considerable purchasing power to support democracy and human rights, instead of buying imports on the cheap by exploiting people who lack basic freedoms.