Is Free Trade the Catalyst that Can Lead Us to Freedom?
Ever since I founded The Future of Freedom Foundation, I have never lost hope of achieving a genuinely free society in my lifetime. By “genuine” I do not mean reforming and improving the the welfare-warfare state, which has come to be defined as “freedom” within conservative and right-wing libertarian circles. By “genuine” I mean the dismantling, not the reform, of all infringements on liberty.
How could this be possible? After all, for all of our lives statism has been so deeply ingrained in American society that achieving the genuinely free society has appeared to be all but impossible. That’s the reason, in fact, why so many libertarians have finally given up and settled for welfare-warfare state reform under the label of “advancing freedom.” But as I have long pointed out, an improved serfdom, while good, is no more freedom than an improved 19th-century slavery would have been freedom.
I have long believed that an unforeseen catalyst could occur that could provide the potential for a cascading effect toward freedom. Once the catalyst begins, the road toward the genuinely free society might begin to open up.
Could the current free-trade controversy be such a catalyst. I don’t know. But it certainly is possible. In all my years as a libertarian, I have never seen such a massive, nationwide outpouring of support for free trade and against tariffs, trade wars, and economic protectionism. That’s one heckuva good sign for libertarianism.
As I stated in my blog yesterday, free trade was certainly not the sentiment in the 1990s when FFF published The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration and when FFF policy advisor James Bovard published his book The Fair Trade Fraud. But over the past 30 years, it is obvious that the power of ideas on liberty has manifested itself by the way free trade has captured the hearts and minds of a massive number of Americans.
The reason why this free-trade phenomenon could serve as a catalyst for a major advance in the direction of freedom is that since people are seeing the tremendous benefits of free trade, they might well be apt to consider other libertarian solutions to the many woes that Americans are suffering — such as in immigration, the drug war, foreign policy, taxation, money, education, the welfare-warfare state, and others.
As most libertarians know, one of the greate
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