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REE TRADE -- free for whom? "First, let us dispense with the marketing term 'free trade,' which is completely deceptive. The WTO, for example, has lowered some barriers to trade but increased others -- such as protectionism for the patent monopolies held by pharmaceutical companies. It is not even clear, in a strictly economic calculation, that American consumers have gained more from the WTO's lowering of other trade barriers than they have lost from the higher price of goods due to its protectionism. " Marc Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2007. FREE RIDER: the problem and contradiction for a free marketeer to resolve while wheeling and dealing in a theoretically perfectly balanced, privately funded and operated market economy. Government involvement in business is anathema to free marketeers (unless that involvement involves a subsidy or a contract to provide services for the government). As a rule, the perspective of business is the smaller the government's footprint, the better. But in the real world, there are classes of expenditures, services and goods necessary to meet society's needs that extend beyond the reach of virtually all private pocketbooks. Consider for example the work of national defense and public education, fire and police departments, public health and safety services, and associated regulatory agencies. These are services that as a society we have come to expect, for the well-being of everyone, but they are not services that can be sold freely to individuals in the marketplace, like a pound of chocolate or a building lot. "It simply doesn't work to sell defense services to those who want them and then not protect the people who refuse to help pay for them. And if they can get the protection without paying for it, why would they choose to pay? " Those who take advantage of the service without paying, are the so-called Free Riders. Michael Watts William Greider writing in The Nation in January, 2007 provides an example closer to the naked truth: Free riders. As American companies move more and more of their manufacturing offshore, many take on the status of 'free riders.' They enjoy all the benefits of being 'American'--government services and subsidies, the protection of the US military--while discarding reciprocal obligations to the country: jobs, economic investment and paying a fair share of the tax burden. The new Democratic majority proposes to repeal some of the tax incentives for moving jobs overseas, but that doesn't begin to address the scope of the deteriorating loyalty. |