On Free Trade

See this Vox Day post:

The Libertarian Case for Free Trade

And please note that for the most of my short life I would have/did describe myself as a sort of Anarcho-Capitalist with Traditionalist leanings. (Warning: Language)

Fantasy and Reality, which will you choose? The life and preservation of the West and its cultures or universalism/internationism without self determination, which will you choose?

(warning: language)

This is all complete mental masturbation as there is no such thing as free trade except in the fantasy sense.

This simple truth kills the whole argument. Until there is a completely level playing field, there is no free trade.

As most countries view themselves as nation-states with national interests, it will ALWAYS be this way unless there is a One World Governmental body.

It seems that only the West is not allowed to seek its own best interests.

One side is playing the trade war and the West is lying down and spreading its collective legs.

When someone speaks the magic spell of free trade, they should be slapped accordingly. They are mentally masturbating to their own theoretical musings of a utopian/fantasy world and nothing more.

Free trade is internationalism/universalism. All cultures will have to be subsumed for it to exist (the benefit of the free movement of labour)

Free trade is utopian mind bullshit. Free trade is anti-West. As a former AnCap, I can't believe how long it took me to see what an autiste I was in this. Now I look at those who still believe this bullshit and wonder how can the intelligent be so damn stupid. They are either too involved with the theory and not the real world, or this is the other side of the communist/marxist coin as a Hegelian mambo death dance for the West.

Also from the comments:

1. James Dixon:
Seriously? Is this the best case they have to offer?

Just one example: However, when you look at our deficits, when you look at it from any standpoint, you begin with the fact that the trade deficit of the US in total is 3% of gross domestic product.

First, it's 3% every year. Year after year after year. The effect is cumulative. Secondly, once a factory moves, it doesn't come back. Those jobs are gone forever. The jobs that supposedly replace it won't be in the same area. But I guess everyone is just supposed to abandon their homes and families and move wherever the the jobs are, and move again five years later when things change again, right?

Second: ...and say that libertarian principles dictate that we should have the freedom to trade, whether it be with a foreigner or with somebody domestic. Nobody has a right to interfere in our right to trade with whomever we please when we perceive mutual benefit.

Tariffs don't stop trade. They merely make you pay more for foreign trade. Just as local and state taxes make things cost more in a given area. It's a matter of how we choose to fund government that works to our best advantage. If we choose to do so via tariffs rather than other taxes, well, that's our decision to make.

2. Tim:
To address only one statement. The problem with losing 3% of jobs to free trade is that represents ONE YEAR. Next year, we have another 3% trade deficit, and there go .03x.97 jobs, and pretty soon the labor participation rate is in the .50s. Hmm, where is labor participation in the US? Oh yeah. If it was really free trade, that 3% would be dropping, and would have reversed by now. But when Mexico and China for example keep their wages and currency artificially low and weak respectively, then the bleeding never stops. In Mexico, the rich get very rich indeed, and the Mexican worker gets marginally better off.....and the American worker is hosed. The same for China, where to you think all those Chinese oligarchs got all those billions? Free trade can work...but only if it is really free trade...and it is still just a leveling between the partners. The United States was so rich we should have pulled Mexico right up to where we were...but in Mexico, the rich saw the benefits, and kept the poor poor, and after 20 years there has been no change....except the working class in the US has suffered.

3. dc.sunsets:
Concentrated benefit, diffuse cost is a problem everywhere, but note how "free trade" embeds it down to the level of the individual choosing where to buy toilet paper.

For 50 years (35 years on overdrive) people in the USA have borrowed in order to enter the marketplace.

The result?
1. GDP ramped higher because borrowing isn't backed out of its bottom line. Discussions of GDP today are rendered worthless, like discussion of the plot of a fictional universe novel.
2. The relative utility of being productive fell, because Say's Law (in order to consume, you must first produce) was placed in stasis...or bludgeoned into a coma, thus instead of production, people increasingly engaged in parlor tricks (the FIRE economy) as a means to great wealth.
3. Monetary wealth (US$) in the form of owning bonds began to FLOOD into the world, seemingly from nowhere. Perception of riches (by sitting on piles of IOU's) skyrocketed, encouraging a spending spree in one market after another.
4. Trade deficits exploded as Americans traded IOU-dollars to export-mercantilist foreigners for inexpensive (price-suppressed) trinkets from clothing to iPhones.
5. A sense of unlimited resources pervaded the entire West. Congress had no limit on spending because every bond issued by the US Treasury was deemed WEALTH so every time Congress pissed away another dollar on some boondoggle, the "economy" was richer by #1 the amount spent and #2 the amount of the bond that was issued to spend it.

Yes, this hammer is my only tool so every problem in today's world looks to me like a nail...BUT...every problem in today's world arises, if you peel the onion enough, from this putrid swamp of monetary con-artistry.

Free trade? Where, when "money" is so detached from production? Consumer sovereignty, when the cumulative "concentrated benefits/diffuse costs" end up being a vast NET CATASTROPHE for people in the USA due to stupid political edicts driven by a complete and total misunderstanding of what is really happening?

For nearly my whole life we've lived under a system of monetary dishonesty so profound and pervasive that it has befuddled the minds of nearly everyone, high and low. Karl Denninger's metaphor of the pond where lily pads double in sq.ft. is quite apt; Now, after 20 years of wage and price stagnation despite a quadrillion dollars in "new wealth" "created" by borrowing, the cracks are appearing in the columns holding up this vast house of cards.

Trade policies of the last 50 years helped HIDE the dishonesty by keeping prices of goods artificially suppressed. Immigration policies of the last 50 years helped HIDE the dishonest by keeping wages artificially suppressed.

And the ASSholes who benefited from this system to the tune of million-dollar yachts and beachfront condo penthouses want to keep the game going.

No. Shit. 

"The benefits of foreign labor are a lie" - Vox Day

The benefits of foreign labor are a lie 

Vox Day @ Vox Popoli

In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and I conclusively demonstrated, using official government statistics, that immigrant labor is a net negative to Americans and American workers. Others who are looking into the subject are reliably finding that the importation of foreign labor is harmful:

Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is not supposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.

Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead....

At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit.

What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit — and often the letter — of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.

I know it's painful for the devotees of free trade, who love nothing better than to compare 21st century analyses to 18th century dogma, to admit, but the increasingly undeniable empirical reality is that free trade, and the free movement of labor, are about as Marxist, globalist, socially destructive, and economically harmful as Communism.

I've read every single defense of free trade that I can find. None of them, not a single one of them, holds up. And as for those who babble childishly about a protectionist government picking winners, as if that suffices to make a rational case, what on Earth do they think is happening in the USA and in the EU now?

All that free trade accomplishes is that it allows governments to pick winners from around the world rather than from inside their own borders. And the winners are those who are willing to pay the most for the privilege, which is why the dominant figures in the U.S. media are a) an Australian and b) a Lebanese based in Mexico.

Update 1 - dc. sunsets comments on the original post:

 I used to be a free trader. I now see that virtually any "good" will be inverted if not embedded in a larger cohesive social milieu.

Shared identity (culture, heritage, etc.) is a powerful system of disciplining naked self-interest. Cultural Marxism's and Blank Slate's first effect is to destroy shared identity, freeing people to undertake individually profitable actions that utterly destroy the commons on which their lives depend.

Multi-culturalism and totalitarian anti-racism/anti-sexism produce, in fact, a monstrous Tragedy of the Commons, where a common culture, common heritage, even common belief systems and common values are the essential connective tissue of a peaceful and prosperous society.

 Maybe it makes me an aspie, but the inescapable conclusion from this logic train is that what "we" need more than anything is separatism.

My family and I will thrive best if we live our lives embedded in a homogeneous society, one where we share the same core values. Given the axioms of HBD, this means we would best live in a society of straight, culturally conservative (at least nominally Christian) people primarily of Northern European descent, and where all others would be encouraged to Go. Somewhere. Else. Such a cohesive community would embed powerful checks and balances on members' individual actions, most of them subtle and private rather than public and legalistic. Borders would be semi-permeable to goods, virtually impermeable to people.

As Hans Hermann Hoppe has noted, Job #1 would be ejecting anyone who tried to infect the Body Politic with the poisons with which it is saturated today.

 @17 Leo, sadly I'm compelled to see that while permeability to people is THE most disastrous of free trade, there must certainly be instances where The Commons of a cohesive society is threatened by certain goods as well.

My lingering libertarian quickly asks, "Who is to decide what is socially good and what is not?" but when caught in the vise between "Authority Decides" and "Naked Self-Interest Rules," I'm now forced to side with Authority.

Until humans self-segregate and geographically separate into relatively homogeneous societies there will be too little social cohesion to subtly apply moral opprobrium in enough quantity to offset naked self-interest. A relatively free society cannot emerge from or even survive amidst heterogeneity, this should now be blatantly obvious.

Until then, the path ahead that does not lead into the Valley of Lord of the Flies must pass through a totalitarian autocracy. Since we're already living in a totalitarian democratic despotism, it's possible an autocracy will actually be an improvement for most of us.