Political poster from the British Liberal Party.
People in cults often find it nearly impossible to get outside the cult outlook on the world. This is very much true of the leading intellectuals in our policy discussions. They all talk about “free trade” as though it is something that the United States has been moving toward in our trade agreements. This is a dogma held both by the proponents of the trade deals made over the last four decades, who dub them as “free trade” agreements and the opponents who proudly pronounce themselves as critics of free trade.
The absurdity of this claim should be apparent to anyone who looked at the trade deals for more than a minute. A major part of all our trade deals for the last four decades has been making patent and copyright monopolies longer and stronger.
You have to be pretty deep in cult thinking if you can believe that these government-granted monopolies are free trade. Somehow our intellectuals, with almost no exceptions, are up to the task.
I really can’t understand how they manage to delude themselves so completely. To be clear, we all recognize that these monopolies have a purpose, they promote innovation and creative work, but having a purpose doesn’t change the fact that they are government policies. Tariffs, quotas, and subsidies all have a purpose, that doesn’t make them free trade.
And there is real money here. In the case of prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals alone we will spend over $700 billion this year on items that would likely cost us not much more than $100 billion in a free market. The difference of near $600 billion would be more than half of the wages paid in manufacturing this year. If we add in the cost of these government-granted monopolies in other sectors, like medical equipment, software, computers, and other devices, it would almost certainly be well over $1 trillion a year.
So, the “free traders” bless a blatant form of government intervention as free trade, which coincidentally has the effect of shifting an enormous amount of income upward. Yet, they turn around and vehemently condemn government interventions that have the ostensible purpose of helping ordinary workers.
I am now largely with the free traders on their criticisms of tariffs and other trade barriers that are supposed to protect U.S. manufacturing. There is no longer any substantial wage premium for workers in manufacturing. This means that we would be jacking up prices for everyone for no obvious benefit to any significant group of workers.
However, I would very much like for us to have a serious debate on patent and copyright monopolies and look to apply the free traders’ recipe. There is an enormous amount of money at stake and in the case of prescription drugs, people’s health and even their lives.
But the free trade cult is very deep. They do not want their patents and copyrights to come up for debate. So don’t look for any thoughtful pieces on the topic in the New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic or other elite outlet. Cult-thinking is very hard to shake, especially among elite intellectuals.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
