|
Essays of Murray N. Rothbard
|
|
Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
|
|
.
|
November 1993
I’m puzzled. I’d like to know why so many
free-marketeers, so many free-market think-tanks and pundits, are not simply
pro-Nafta, but are fervently, frantically, almost hysterically pro-Nafta. Look,
I can understand, though not agree with, mild approval. An old libertarian
friend of mine, for example, told me that he was mildly pro-Nafta but not
really interested in the entire topic. That seems sensible. So why the furor,
the passion, the enormous resources poured into praising Nafta and reviling its
critics? Why is there a highly active free-market Nafta Network, when no one
has ever bothered forming a Repeal-the-Income Tax Network, or an
Abolish-the-Fed Network? And if we want to confine passion to more directly
political issues, why was there no Lower-Taxes Network, or
Stop-the-Clinton-Budget Network? Why is the entire pack: the Cato crowd, the
rest of the Kochtopus or Koch Machine, the majority of Heritage, the Tony Snows
and the Steve Chapmans, why are they going all out, playing hardball, in their
frenzy to get this thing passed? Why are these gentry acting as if their
lives depended on the passage of Nafta? Could it be because if not their
lives, at least their fortunes (though scarcely their sacred honor), do in
fact depend on it?
The twists and turns of this crowd have
been truly a sight to see. First, they confidently strode forth to represent
the “free trade” cause, denouncing their opponents as leftists or ignorant
protectionists. But then, when hard-core free marketeers and free traders such
as people at Triple R, the Mises Institute, and the Competitive
Enterprise Institute weighed in to attack Nafta as a managed trade and
international statist scam in “free-trade” clothing, the pro-Nafta gang wheeled
around to denounce us as free-trade “purists,” or, as Tony Snow called
it in all his tom-fool ignorance, “the Adam Smith objection.” But even if this
crowd has no shame, surely their sudden change of front must be causing them
some tactical embarrassment. For how can they pose as the champions of free trade
while at the same time denouncing genuine free traders as “purists”?
The
“free traders” for Nafta confront their biggest problem when we point out that,
under Nafta, super-governmental commissions, unaccountable to any taxpayers,
will be able to enforce and “upwardly harmonize” ever greater environmental and
labor regulation standards against the wishes of the citizens of each country.
The reply of the pro-Nafta people is that these are scare tactics, that these
enforcement provisions are really petty and minor – nothing to worry about.
Well, let’s consider the crucial enforcement provisions that Nafta and its side
agreements hand over to these supra-national commissions. Tony Snow and Steve
Chapman assure us that these provisions are petty and meaningless. But on the
other hand, Kathleen Rogers, counsel to the savvy environmentalist Audubon
Society, supports Nafta precisely because of these enforcement provisions. Most
important, Clinton’s own Trade Czar, Mickey Kantor, assures one and all that
under Nafta, “no country in the agreement can lower its environmental standards
– ever,” and he applies that assurances of all-out enforcement to labor
regulations (e.g., labor laws, workplace standards, minimum wages) as well.
So, if there’s a difference of opinion on
the strength of enforcement between Snow and Chapman on the one hand, and
Mickey Kantor of the Clinton administration on the other, whose interpretation do
you think will win out?
There is only one sensible interpretation
of these “free marketeers”: that they are serving as a rather feeble figleaf
for the naked seizure of power by international statism. To return to the $64
question: why are they investing so much passion in this effort?
Here is a possible clue to this puzzle.
Take this seeming anomaly. On the one hand, in Annex 602.3 to Nafta, the
allegedly “free-market” Salinas government of Mexico “reserves to itself,” in
no uncertain terms, all possible provision of and investment in every aspect of
the exploration, production, or refining of crude oil and natural gas. And yet,
despite that grim fact, the heads of both the Natural Gas Supply Association
and the American Gas Association, express their great enthusiasm for Nafta. As
President Michael Baly of the American Gas Association puts it: “The AGA
supports Nafta because it would benefit natural gas energy, equipment,
technology, and services trade with Mexico and Canada.”
Oh? How can this be, if the Mexican
government insists on socializing all aspects of oil and natural gas? Methinks
we can smell a rat. It is not generally known that the most enthusiastic
advocates of socialized energy production in the case of electricity, in the
1930s – of Boulder Dam, TVA, etc. – were the private electric utility
companies. For the government built the dams, provided the electricity at cheap
rates subsidized by the hapless taxpayers, and then resold that
electricity to the private utility companies, who benefited from
government-subsidized primary electricity. The private energy middlemen reaped
the profits.
There is a vital lesson here: much of Big
Government, much of the welfare-interventionist State, is pushed by private
businesses in order to force the taxpayers to subsidize their own costs. (Just
as in the even more flagrant case of military industries, the government
provides contracts at whatever cost plus a guaranteed profit.) In short,
business groups don’t mind socialism at all when the government is socializing
their cost.
So may it not be true that American natural
gas companies expect to benefit by purchasing gas, whose cheap production will
be subsidized by the unfortunate Mexican taxpayer? And doesn’t this provide a
lesson about our own “free-market” institutes and pundits, many of whom are
subsidized heavily, past, present or hopefully in the future, by Wichita,
Kansas, oil billionaires Charles and David Koch, whose mammoth privately held
Koch Industries concentrates on the transportation of oil and natural gas?
Query: Does Koch Industries – which in November 1992 purchased 9,271 miles of
natural gas pipelines to Mexico for $1.1 billion – expect to benefit heavily
from Nafta? And so such expectations account for the passion, for the fervor,
of those persons and institutions who form part, in reality or in hope, of the
giant Koch Machine?
As for those free marketeers not in the
Koch network, how much of the massive Mexican government lobbying in Washington
is funneling moolah into these institutions? Let us not forget that part of “free-market”
Nafta involves an estimated $20 billion of foreign aid which the conned U.S.
taxpayers will be pouring into the coffers of the Mexican government. How much
Mexican lobbying, and how many of the possible bribes, are a down payment on
this promised boodle?
If we really had a press and a media
responsive to the American people not to the malignant power elite, these
questions would be investigated, and fast. In the meanwhile, we should follow
our noses, and apply to the “free-market” and “free-trade” protestations of
these worthies a liberal dose of salt. How many times will we be fooled until
we realize that it is concrete policies, not cheap and cloudy rhetoric, that
counts?
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the
Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and academic vice president
of the Mises
Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed
Lew as his literary executor. See his books.
