According to Adam Smith we have to be cautious that free trade to some measure only means freedom for competitive monetary greed.

Thus as a philosopher, Smith also advised about more sympathy and care for the downtrodden who might suffer even more through the backwash of competitive monetary greed.

Cheers, BB, WA.

A well-written article that explains much of the hostility to free trade among those who might stand to benefit from it. The point about the hypocrisy and self-interest of the developed world is particularly important, give trade’s potential to help lift the world’s poor out of poverty.

Maybe the term - free - in free trade should be replaced by -fair.

As in sport where strong rules including an umpire are needed to tone back the urge to be as free as one likes, where over-skill can become over-kill.

Similar to big business where economic over-greed can virtually control a whole country, as with the East India Company with Ceylon, and maybe our own Wesfarmers which is about to join the Big Biz mafia, a term one remembers from the Great Depression when Dreyfus and Bunge robbed the graingrowers because in those days when free-trade bargaining was rife, not many outback farmers had phones.

The lesson learnt should be the one where the free-market trade must be carefully monitored by good governments not only for the good of one nation, but the benefit of the whole of society.

Apologies from an old Cockie,

Cheers, BB.

I wouldn't agree that capital is currently mobile. Capital must be induced to move. Why would capital head across borders seeking the most productive arable lands when the resulting production can't get past import barriers or the efficient crops cost of production is more than world prices set by subsidised producer states dumping excess production on world markets? So in this way capital is held captive to the barrier and subsidy protected states.

It is also difficult to reference practical examples of free trade achievement for non industrial developing countries when the main export production opportunity is trade in agriculture. For example, sugar world market prices remain in the basement below Brazil's cost of production because the US subsidises inefficient corn based ethanol. It isn't that the opportunities are not there, but to make headway is impossible, so all the historical antecedents of talking the talk and not walking the walk give free trade the bad name.

Bushbred takes up a good point, made some time ago by Stiglitz and Charlton, 'Fair trade for all'.
The very term 'free trade' breathtakingly misleading, as any quick perusal of the relevant agreement will demonstrate. Hell, you don't even have to open the bloody things, just look at the sheer volume of words to describe just how 'free' this trade will be.
So long as a minute sector of the human population regard wealth as no more than a game, where it is logical and necessary for one individual to be able to amass more wealth than whole countries of people -in order to prove who wins- inequality and unfair trade will never be stamped out.
Why can these people not understand, children are DYING.

Grim, Stiglitz is up to his neck in the problem. The socialist romantic that has nothing but disaster to offer. Try to find an exchange rate in Stiglitz's work, the world doesn't go beyond US borders for him. He is the one trying to justify broad acre farming barons getting prices that are set by subsidy to bail out or effectively pay a "social wage" to small block farmers in the mid west. The rapacious baron further west pockets the difference and the african farmer gets no capital and can't compete for export on world markets and african starving consumers get lousy prices or no food at all as their governments try to shield their farmers. And this same Stiglitz would have the US pump priming til the cows come home (or better still that the Berlin wall falls). All this socialisation of losses in the US right now, look to all the US dove academics justifying narrow bodgy CPI rate based interest rate decisions for decades, and that suited their wall street compadres fine "as long as they could keep dancing" according to Chuck Prince.