Free-trade and Transfer of wealth:
Nobody engages in a trade for its own sake. Trade is done
for acquiring gains, profits and wealth. And for that
matter, all economic activities are done for some personal
gains - in the short term or in the long term.
Trade-based economic model is based on maximization of
prosperity/profits, division of labor and exploitation of
nature and fellow-man. Each person, under the system, tries
to maximize his or her gains at the expense of another
person in any trade transaction. The system, as a whole,
tries to maximize the division of labor, division of
knowledge and division of ownership in order to empower the
system itself. The system also promotes the maximum inter-
dependencies among individuals, families, communities and
eventually among nations for even basic needs so as to make
them totally dependent on the system itself. The system also
promote commercialization of nature and its efficient and
speedy and mass exploitation and depletion.
Trade based economic model is totally opposite of an
economic model based on the self-sufficiency, indivisibility
of labor and milking of nature. I will call this model a
classical model for the sake of providing contrast to the
trade-based modern model.
The prosperity of a collective, division of labor-knowledge-
ownership and depletion of nature are the pillars on which
trade-based economic model operates. Notice that all of its
foundations are expansionist.
There is no set definition of prosperity. It is elastic and
insatiable. If the definition of prosperity gets to be
driven by the expansionist greed and hedonism, there is
nothing built into the system to check it. Greed for the
sake of greed, greed for the sake of power, prosperity for
the sake of prosperity are dehumanizing and enslaving stages
and they are easily able to piggy back on the trade-based
model. Thus, prosperity driven model can not put breaks on
the trade-based model like model based on self-sufficiency
can. Model based on self-sufficiency is checked from
unlimited expansion by the limited resources and energies
that individuals or families can harness on their own. Thus
greed and hedonism can not ride on such economic model as
they can on the trade-based model.
Secondly, trade-based model seeks prosperity of the
collective. There is not set definition of the collective.
The model starts out with maximizing the prosperity of the
family but it does not stop there. The collective for which
prosperity is sought progressively enlarge to cover
community, a province, a region, a nation, a continent, a
racial group, a culture, a religious or cultural group or
their alliances, a whole empire, whole globe. Thus both
pursuit of prosperity and the collective for which wealth
and prosperity are sought are very elastic and expansionist.
Therefore, they can not provide any checks to the trade-
based model as to when to say enough is enough and when to
contain itself.
Similarly, principle of division is also expansionist.
Trade-based model starts out with division of labor, but it
also progressively carries out division of knowledge and
division of ownership/property rights. It creates even finer
and finer divisions of them and progressively make the
individual, and than family, and than community, and than
province, and than nation and than continents totally
marginal, dependent, interchangeable and inconsequential in
the trade order presided over and controlled by a handful of
entities. All decentralized self-sufficiencies in the sphere
of knowledge, ownership, wealth are lost for ever and they
are made totally dependant on mercy of the trade order for
survival. The classical model that stresses self-sufficiency
and indivisibility of labor, family is made self-sufficient,
than village, than community and than province and than
nation and than the continent and than the world. And as
each level acquire self-sufficiencies, they are freed up to
pursue non-economic pursuits, acquire independence, freedom
and autonomy from each other, and allowed to work as
sovereign and autonomous entities.
Thirdly, nature is depleted and destroyed under the trade-
based order. Here again, Trade-based order can not stop with
just milking the nature, it must eat the whole beef.
Economic prosperity, employment etc come to depend on
continuous depletion of nature. If the rate at which nature
is consumed is greater than the ability of nature to
replenish itself, nature gets depleted and eventually
destroyed for good. If something takes 100 years for the
nature to replenish and if you consume it all in split-
minute, than it amounts to depletion of nature. If you
deplete it at such a faster rate that nature gets exhausted
before nature is in position to replenish it, than you are
destroying nature. Trade-based economic model brings in such
stages and consequences upon the earth. However, in the
interim stages, since nature is vast, its variety is so
vast, the phenomenal rate of depletion is not all that
visible in the short-run. So vastness and variety of nature
provides elasticity to the trade-based order in stead of
putting any checks on it. Trade-based model constantly seeks
out greener pastures to tap untapped nature and resources.
Thus, trade-based economics does not produce prosperity,
wealth or nature, it merely redistributes and consumes the
prosperity, wealth and nature. The entire foundation of this
model is expansionist. Since it is consumption-oriented, it
constantly has to expand commercialization, add new markets
and exploit new frontiers even to maintain its current
prosperity. When trade-order saturate a given community or
province, it seeks to engulf the whole nation within its
order. When a given nation get saturated and provide no more
expansionist potential, it seeks to engulf neighboring
nations, hemispheres, continents and ultimately the whole
globe. Thus, trade-based economic order end in global
pyramid.
Trade-based model, when confined to a national base of
operation, creates classes within the nation. When all
people compete to maximize there gains, there will always be
some who will succeed more than others and some will get
exploited more than others. And remember that trade-based
order do not produce any new wealth, it merely transforms,
packages the existing wealth and transfers the wealth, from
one individual to another, one family to another, from
nature to a factory, from factory to another factory, from
factory to individuals. Thus wealth is transferred endlessly
among people and at any moment, some will have more of it
than others. Thus, such trade-based order create classes,
haves and have-nots at national level.
However, if the national economy is able to absorb the
economies of other nations through trade, than the
distribution of the classes and have-nots gets spread out
across the spectrum of the trade-zone which now spans across
the several nations, and the stronger nation can arrange the
polity and economic relationships in such a way that the
have-nots and lower-classes produced by the trade-based
model are concentrated only beyond its national borders.
This is possible because trade acquires wealth and
consumerism spends wealth. Whoever conducts the trade and
provide goods and services acquire wealth and whoever merely
provides labor and consumption of goods spends and transfers
the wealth. Nation providing goods and services procure
wealth from other nations and nation providing merely labor
and markets merely spend its wealth and transfer to its
trading partner.
Thus, global trade order globalizes the classes and have-
nots. It produces first-world, middle-world and third-world.
Nations who are politically strong and who have mastered the
trade-order can export its lower-classes and haves-not
conditions to the weaker nations while strengthening its
prosperity by wealth-transfer from all over the world. Free-
flow of goods and services and money and ownerships
facilitate flow of wealth to the top and flow of misery to
the bottom. Trickle-down theory in national level operation
make rich richer and poor poorer and poor people at the
mercy of trickle down effect. Globalization of this theory
is allowed by globalization of trade which makes rich
nations richer and poor nations poorer. Rich nations entice
the poor nations with novelty of consumerism and increased
standard of living to give up their economic sovereignty and
join the global trade regime but international consumerism
only deplete even whatever wealth such poor nations have
managed to have. Consumerism is nothing but expenditure of
wealth in exchange for life-style. When consumerism is
confined within a nation, there is wealth transfer among
people but nations as a whole does not loose wealth. But
internationalized consumerism transfers wealth from consumer
to the producer across national borders. Some nations
acquire wealth and some nations lose it.
Even the new employment gains by international trade are
short-lived. These gains are spent right back on giving
greater boost to consumerism. As long as a nation has the
wealth to transfer, employments, consumerism and traders
remain vibrant in the nation. After that, the real
exploitation, dehumanization, colonialism and enslavement
begin. So consumerism, imported life-styles and employments
can not be considered signs of national progress. It is a
sign of degeneration and eventual fall of nation. This is
true for all nations that would be at the bottom of the
global pyramid.
Trade is such an expansionist thing, that it constantly
expands its domain. It commercializes every aspect of human
life, human relationships, human values, human needs. It
also depletes nature, commercializes nature, privatizes
nature, destroys nature. Land, water, air and some of the
natural gifts that man absolutely can not live without
become commercialized. A free-trade where nothing is free
and everything has a cost and a price! It establishes
supremacy of capitalism over humanity, nations, nature and
even culture. Expansionist commercialism even subjects
culture to commercial values. Cultural products and
political ideas become goods and services and they are
subjected to free-trade. Thus cultural invasion, political
invasion become inseparable from free-trade. Films, movies,
TV, magazines, books, newspapers, educational curricula etc
reflect not only commercial ventures but also they are also
part and parcel of cultural and political values too. Thus
economic invasion become inseparable from cultural and
political invasion. Take over of national economy through
trade domination become inseparable from cultural and
political take over of the nation and subjugation of the
native models. Thus, economic take over expand to become
take over of cultural and political sovereignties. This is
true for nations who are at the bottom of the global pyramid
created by the trade-based model.
In trade-based model, everything is sough to be globalized
and their free-flow is sought except people as if people do
not represent knowledge, skills, labor, resource, services.
People can not move about freely to maximize their gains.
Only capital, wealth and goods and services, corporations
etc allowed the free-flow that transcend national
boundaries. Even if free-trade regime destroy the nation-
state and sovereignties of poor nations, it has to be
imposed on all. But since free-flow of people from poor to
the rich nations can hamper the nation-state and world-state
sovereignties of the rich nations, it is ruthlessly objected
by the free-traders. Instead of people moving to the rich
nations and disrupting them, free-traders make the reverse
case of rich nations taking their operations to the poor
nations to disrupt them. Thus, free-trade is a demonic,
self-serving and inhumane concept. There is not greater
organized evil than free-trade.
In a classical model which is an antithesis of trade-based
model, emphasis is on giving economic self-sufficiency and
consequent economic sovereignty to families, communities,
provinces and nations. Here trade is also used for
reinforcing and supplementing the economic self-sufficiency.
But it is used as a peripheral and complimentary measure and
not as the central part of the economic model. Plus trade
has to be subjected to checks and balances so that its
expansionist traits are inhibited and subdued. World knows
it only too well that most of the dehumanizations and
slavery of entire class and race of people have come through
the route of traders. Man is more than economic animal. The
goal of any economic model has to be to ensure economic
well-being of the society and make it so effortless that
people are able to pursue other non-economic and loftier
pursuits in life. Expansionist economic models entangle
humanity in never-ending and ever-expanding economic
pursuits and consume the humanity. People end up spending
their entire life in preparing for economic life and pursuit
of economic life and even at the end of such hectic life,
the sum total of their wealth barely cover their old-age.
Sum total of their economic activity at the fag end of their
life turns out to be a big zero and so is the sum total of
their non-economic pursuits. They have nothing to pass it on
to the next generation who must start from big zero-line and
repeat the cycle all over again. This is the complete
dehumanization and devaluation of life and humanity. Under
trade-based economic model, nobody is a winner.
By Manmohan Sinha
Sept,1994
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