Matt Welch makes some excellent points about the reality of world trade but the following bit suggests he does not read the Samizdata very often.
If free traders spent as much time railing against rich-country protectionism as they do making fun of the anti-globalization kids, the pig-puppet audience would dwindle to a core of fog-headed Maoists, and more importantly, destitute people around the world could vault out of poverty much faster.
We are wounded Matt! You mean we are not your default page when you boot up the ol’ box every morning? We often go though periods of railing against the immorality and stupidity of protectionism. Such as:
Stupidity beyond the measure of language by Natalija Radic on February 1st:
Jospin is a man who is responsible more than any other political figure in the EU (and that is saying something) for people like me being fined and harassed by EU states for trying to do business within the EU because I am an outsider, just another Slavic white nigger girl. Naturally he takes much the same view of Africans and Asians who try to do business in the EU.
Comments worth repeating by Perry de Havilland on January 30th:
To be “strongly against world trade” is to be in favour of poverty and against free association. It is to favour force over choice. It is to favour death and famine in the third world. Anyone who actually wants for the peoples of South America, Africa and Asia to prosper should be demanding not an end to world trade but the removal of all barriers to entry to the US and EU markets. At a stroke that would result in cheaper products for common working western people as cheaper African, South American and Asian goods become available. Immediately the economies of third world nations would improve as they could sell their products without immoral grotesque discriminatory tariff barriers.
What free trade actually means by Natalie Solent on December 18th 2001:
So the European Union, having stopped Africans making a respectable living as producers and traders by denying them access to us, then bestows a lesser largesse via ‘Third World Aid’. Adding insult to injury, the EU then expects gratitude from the very people they have discriminated against. Of course what happens is that Africans, now being dependent on largesse rather than their own efforts, take on the character of beggars, whiny when desperate and sullen when temporarily a little better fed. We in our turn take on the character of patronising social workers-cum-lords of the manor. What a pity, when we could be interacting as equals and fellow human beings.
… and those are just the ones I can be bothered to find. So you see, Matt, here on Samizdata this particular group of free traders really really doesn’t like protectionism and we attack it on both economic and moral grounds quite often.
