Society is cooperation; it is community in action.

This post originally appeared on cobdencentre.org.

Razeen Sally’s Trade Policy, New Century (PDF) succeeds magnificently in explaining the 21st-century case for free trade and, specifically, unilateral trade liberalisation to the interested, non-specialist reader.

From the IEA home page of the book:

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is failing to deliver the trade liberalisation desperately needed to bring prosperity to developing countries, according to a new study released today by the Institute of Economic Affairs. The WTO is hamstrung by a cumbersome negotiating model and the influence of vocal protectionist lobbies who oppose free markets. At the same time, increasingly popular regional ‘free-trade agreements’ often create as many barriers as they remove by erecting new obstacles to trade with countries outside the blocs concerned.

In the context of policy paralysis at the WTO, the author, LSE trade expert Dr Razeen Sally, argues that governments must take back the initiative from supranational institutions. The priority must be unilateral liberalisation – removing trade barriers to benefit domestic consumers rather than waiting for tortuous international negotiations to be resolved. Governments can also help maximise the benefits of free trade by liberalising their economies and strengthening key institutions.

But what is the imperative for the UK? Surely, European Union citizens enjoy free trade?

The EU is a customs union: we trade ostensibly freely within it, but, as can be seen from the EU’s TARIC database, we find ourselves behind a complex system of tariffs on, for example, wheat, notwithstanding the battle long since won by our inspiration, Richard Cobden, to repeal England’s Corn Laws in the general interest.

And this is the key point: free trade is in the general interest. We may make the political and economic arguments in detail, but the public good is our ultimate aim, and not just at home. Razeen Sally explains (pp179-180, emphasis mine):

Adam Smith fortified his presumption in favour of free trade with an explicit political argument. Protectionism is driven by ‘the clamorous importunity of partial interests’ who capture government and prevent it from having ‘an extensive view of the general good’. Free trade, in contrast, tilts the balance away from rent-seeking producer interests and towards the mass of consumers. It is part of a wider constitutional package to keep government limited, transparent and clean, enabling it to concentrate better on the public good.

As important to Smith and Hume was the moral case for free trade, centred on individual freedom. Individual choice is the engine of free trade, and of progressive commercial society more generally. It sparks what Hume called a ‘spirit of industry’; it results in much better life-chances, not just for the select few but for individuals in the broad mass of society who are able to lead more varied and interesting lives.

To sum up: free trade is of course associated with standard economic efficiency arguments. But the classical-liberal case for free trade is more rounded, taking in the moral imperative of individual freedom and linking it to prosperity. Finally, free trade contributes to, though it does not guarantee, peaceful international relations. Freedom, prosperity, security: this trinity lies at the heart of the case for free trade.

In a short article, I can scarcely do justice to this monograph’s insight in relation to the case for classic liberalism nor to its observations on emerging geopolitics: I heartily recommend the book.

Further reading

• Dr Razeen Sally at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE)
• The ECIPE blog

Via Ireland votes yes to Lisbon treaty | World news | guardian.co.uk :

In a dramatic political U-turn, Ireland has voted decisively in favour of the Lisbon treaty just 16 months after it first rejected the European Union reform plan.

With counting continuing this evening it was expected that 64% of those who voted in Friday’s referendum would have backed the treaty.

But I don’t like this result: best two out of three?

Now expect to hear Eurocrats celebrating the democratic will of the Irish people…

In a related message, David Cameron has sent this to supporters (emphasis mine), explaining how difficult a Conservative win will be to secure:

Our Conference starts in Manchester this weekend. It’s going to be the most vibrant and exciting for years.

Next week, we won’t be playing it safe – instead we will be offering bold plans to deal with the big problems the country faces.

Labour spent their conference talking only to themselves – not the country.

In contrast you will see a Conservative Party united, determined and ready to deliver the bold, tough and radical change Britain needs.

Labour are now the party of unemployment – at this conference we will show that we are the party of new jobs and new opportunities.

To deal with Labour’s Debt Crisis we will be setting out some of the tough decisions that need to be taken and unlike Gordon Brown we won’t duck them.

To give people hope for the future the country needs to change direction, and our Conference will show how we’re ready to make that change.

But there is absolutely no complacency.

Every member of the Conservative Party needs to remember the following: the Conservatives have never won a General Election from a starting point as difficult as we face now.

To win a majority, we must hold every seat we won in 2005 plus an additional 117 constituencies. This would be the biggest number of Conservative gains at a General Election since 1931.

We can do it: but we are going to have to work incredibly hard for every vote, every day between now and polling day. In this election, every vote will count.

This weekend we will hear the results of the referendum in Ireland on the re-named EU Constitution.

I want to make one thing clear: there will be no change in our policy on Europe and no new announcements at the Conference. There will be no change in Conservative policy as long as the Lisbon Treaty is still not in force. The Treaty has still not been ratified by the Czechs and the Poles. The Czech Prime Minister has said that the constitutional challenge before the Czech Constitutional Court could take 3-6 months to resolve.

I have said repeatedly that I want us to have a referendum. If the Treaty is not ratified in all Member States and not in force when the election is held, and if we are elected, then we will hold a referendum on it, we will name the date of the referendum in the election campaign, we will lead the campaign for a ‘No’ vote.

If the Treaty is ratified and in force in all Member States, we have repeatedly said we would not let matters rest there. But we have one policy at a time, and we will set out how we would proceed in those circumstances if, and only if, they happen.

This is going to be a great Conference. I look forward to seeing many of you in Manchester.

Well, I’m off to Manchester tomorrow where I will be chairing three joint fringe debates for the Smith Institute and the Centre for Social Justice on the bank bailouts, housing and insolvency. Looking forward to it.

I am constantly amazed by the equivocation of people who really should understand the importance of being able to dismiss a government at the ballot box.

I love Europe. I want deeper, freer relations among European people — all people for that matter — but I am not prepared to surrender democratic control of power in order to install a government which plans to force what could happen naturally. And yet here is Daniel Finkelstein’s view:

Second, they risk looking unreasonable and obsessive about Europe. While resisting the treaty before ratification was completely correct, resisting it after ratification risks Cameron’s image as a moderate person, fit to govern, someone who gets things in proportion.

Read more at Comment Central – Times Online – WBLG: What the Conservatives should do about Europe.

At this point, all we can do is hope that either the Irish vote no or that the Cameron team has a good answer up its sleeve. Otherwise, we may find ourselves locked into a failed and failing superstate.

This morning, I woke early and finished The Great European Rip-off: How the Corrupt, Wasteful EU is Taking Control of Our Lives.  I then discovered this article in the Telegraph:

The global financial crisis has inflicted such damage to free market principles that it risks undermining the core function of Brussels and triggering the disintegration of the European Union, according to the EU’s most revered economic figure.

…

Former Italian premier Massimo D’Alema said the EU’s modernisation drive sketched at Lisbon in 2000 was fantasy. “We are prisoners of our rhetoric,” he said. “It is an illusion to think that once crisis is over we will return to where we were. The US and China will emerge stronger: we will be left ever further behind. Within 15 years not a single country in the EU will qualify for the G7, except perhaps Germany.”

via EU faces ‘existential’ danger from economic crisis – Telegraph.

In this context, it is vitally important to form a strictly pragmatic view of the EU and whether it will help or hinder our recovery.

Craig and Elliott wrestle courageously to deliver just that in The Great European Rip-off, though the title rather gives away their conclusions. It seems to me any objective review of the EU would conclude that it is an exorbitantly expensive threat to our prosperity and freedom.
Read more

Via CentreRight: One hundred reasons why Ireland should say ‘no’ (again) to Lisbon:

Jim McConalogue, Editor of The European Journal and occasionally of this parish, has listed one hundred reasons why Ireland should again reject Lisbon. It was disclosed at the weekend that Ryanair are helping to bankroll the ‘Yes campaign’ which current opinion polling suggests is on course for victory.

Read more here, and if you have not done so, it is well worth watching Daniel Hannan’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference last year here.

It is indeed an incredible thing that ostensible advocates of democracy are prepared to support the Lisbon Treaty. Ladies and gentlemen, the EU will be what is laid down in its Constitution, and that is a state whose ultimate and active originators of law cannot be dismissed at the ballot box.

As Karl Popper said:

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.

Karl Popper is without doubt my favourite character in political philosophy. He was rational, believing knowledge and truth to be objective, but aware of the boundaries of reason. A scientist but concerned with the mechanisms of society. By humanitarian inclination a social democrat — when that meant “Marxist” — but by reason a liberal: a believer in freedom.

In the course of things, I rediscovered these quotations by Popper, which seem apt today, as we hastily seek solutions to our present difficulties:

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

Perhaps one from his time, when the foolish utopian experiment communism was still alive in the world:

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

And defining ‘tyranny’:

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy”, and the other “tyranny”.

On the role of intellectuals:

Why do I think that we, the intellectuals, are able to help? Simply because we, the intellectuals, have done the most terrible harm for thousands of years. Mass murder in the name of an idea, a doctrine, a theory, a religion — that is all our doing, our invention: the invention of the intellectuals. If only we would stop setting man against man — often with the best intentions — much would be gained. Nobody can say that it is impossible for us to stop doing this.

On historicism, but more generally applicable to positivism in economics: trying to produce specific outcomes when ultimately you can only do so by manipulating the actions of individual men and women:

We may become the makers of our fate when we have ceased to pose as its prophets.

On freedom and tolerance:

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

So let us be tolerant then, but only up to the point our open society is threatened, and let us also be reasonable:

There are many difficulties impeding the rapid spread of reasonableness. One of the main difficulties is that it always takes two to make a discussion reasonable. Each of the parties must be ready to learn from the other. You cannot have a rational discussion with a man who prefers shooting you to being convinced by you.

And also, thinking of the sacrifices we are invited to make today for the future — I think particularly of the world’s desperately poor, who need inexpensive energy¹:

Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.

We might reflect on whether we are still permitted to apply our intelligence in every area:

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

And whether we are succumbing to the temptation to rely on the government for our security at the expense of our freedom:

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.

Most schemes of social organisation have been explored and lived through, but one thing is certain: those who follow us will have different ideas and preferences which we cannot know in advance. We must allow room for our successors to develop these ideas and preferences, that is:

We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.

1. And we are not far behind. [↩]

Via Extradition without justice | Anita Coles | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk :

Liberty believes, as did the UK parliament for many years, that no one should be extradited unless and until the requesting country makes out a basic case against them in a UK court. Failure on this front can result in an innocent person being sent halfway across the world – away from family, supporters and legal advisers – to face unsound, trumped-up or politically motivated charges, to say nothing of probable pre-trial imprisonment. This can and does happen under the European arrest warrant.

Ireland’s EU Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, has conceded that voters in most EU countries would reject the stalled Lisbon Treaty.

via Ireland commissioner says most EU countries would reject Lisbon Treaty – Telegraph.

The European Commission and other EU officials are celebrating after the Prime Minister accepted on Thursday night the creation of European supervisors over national regulators.

Senior EU officials described how in return for a promise that Brussels regulators can not have power to tell the British government when, and by how much, to bail out banks, Mr Brown has given ground on a broad range of other supervisory powers.

via Gordon Brown surrenders key powers over financial regulation to Brussels – Telegraph.

See also King seeks empire and EU ‘risks lagging US on regulation’.

As we approach leaving the EPP, let’s remember someone else who gets it:

We must say openly that the present economic system of the EU is a system of a suppressed market, a system of a permanently strengthening centrally controlled economy. Although history has more than clearly proven that this is a dead end, we find ourselves walking the same path once again. This results in a constant rise in both the extent of government masterminding and constraining of spontaneity of market processes. In recent months, this trend has been further reinforced by incorrect interpretation of the causes of the present economic and financial crisis, as if it were caused by free market, while in reality it is just the contrary – caused by political manipulation of the market. It is again necessary to point to the historical experience of our part of Europe and to the lessons we learned from it.

via Václav Klaus – Speech of the President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus in the European Parliament.