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Mostrando postagens com marcador Free trade. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Free trade. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 13 de junho de 2022

Patentes de vacinas anti-Covid na ministerial da OMC - Doug Palmer and Sarah Anne Aarup (Politico)

 Politico EU, Bruxelas – 11.6.2022

Globalization's gut check: 

World Trade Organization gathering offers a test of free trade system

If the global organization can’t reach a consensus on some of the low-hanging fruit on its agenda, there is little hope it can help tackle the world's biggest challenges.

Doug Palmer and Sarah Anne Aarup

 

The future of globalization faces a major test as the World Trade Organization kicks off its first big decision-making meeting in five years in Geneva on Sunday.

The immediate issues on the table involve Covid-19 vaccine patents, environmentally harmful fishing subsidies and global food security concerns heightened by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But the bigger question looming over the gathering is whether the WTO can still forge international cooperation at a time when multiple crises and increasing frictions between the United States and China are upending the world order. Those crises have spurred a widespread re-think of globalization: Countries are increasingly turning their economic focus inward, looking to protect and promote their own industries — often at the expense of the open trade system that the WTO was designed to promote.

The WTO’s ministerial meeting, slated to run June 12 to June 15, will try to tackle some of those trends — albeit at the margins. If the organization can’t reach a consensus on even low-hanging fruit like easing fishing subsidies and maintaining a ban on e-commerce tariffs, there is little hope it can accomplish more challenging objectives such as contributing to the fight against global climate change or shoring up food systems as global hunger skyrockets.

“That’s why this is such a critical period for the system,” said Rufus Yerxa, a former WTO deputy director general who now works for McLarty Associates, an international trade consultancy. “Because if we really sort of disembowel the WTO now, it’s going to be harder to use it in the future to achieve those kinds of objectives.”

“I think it is important that the WTO be seen as part of the solution to the simultaneous crises we’re facing in the world now,” WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told POLITICO in an interview. “All of these crises at the same time that no one country in the world can solve. You need multilateralism. You need international cooperation.”

Recent crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have only served to further divide the globe, however — between rich countries able to rapidly produce their own Covid vaccines and low-income nations who couldn’t; and between Western democracies, who’ve rallied to isolate Russia, and much of the rest of the world, which is taking a far more ambivalent stance on the conflict. The crises have also heightened the rivalry between the U.S. and China, the world’s two leading economies, which are pushing very different models of trade and governance.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly described that rivalry as a battle to prove democracy still works better than autocracy in the 21st century. And his administration, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have been advocating a new model of economic engagement that focuses on collaboration with friendly countries, or “friend-shoring.”

Okonjo-Iweala, however, warned this week that splitting up the world’s economies and supply chains into political blocs would have damaging consequences — noting that WTO economists have made a preliminary estimate that dividing the world into two economic spheres would lead to a 5 percent decrease in real global GDP over the longer term.

“That is quite a stunning number,” the WTO chief said. “I’d like us to be careful. This multilateral trading system was built up over 75 years. It’s helped to lift over a billion people out of poverty. It’s delivered peace, which is one of the things it was intended to do, through interdependence.”

Still, Russia’s war in Ukraine has further fractured the international community and propelled the world toward an unprecedented hunger crisis as inflation and conflict push up the price of food for the world’s lowest-income people.

Okonjo-Iweala said she did not expect Russia’s participation next week to prevent deals from being reached, even though many delegations refuse to meet with them. Negotiators have devised ways to work around that obstacle over the past few months, she said.

“Undoubtedly, there will be some tensions as there have been in every meeting. We hope this will not stop us doing our work,” Okonjo-Iweala said.

But the war adds to the array of problems distracting attention from the rules-based trading system embodied in the WTO.

“I can hardly think of a more difficult backdrop for a WTO ministerial than this one,” Yerxa said. “I think the biggest challenge, obviously, is to try to make governments recognize that the risk of even further destabilizing multilateralism is that it won’t make their domestic politics better in the long run, it’ll make them worse.”

Okonjo-Iweala, who took the helm of the global trade body a little more than a year ago, is trying to notch up two big wins in the form of agreements that could potentially expand production of Covid vaccines and curtail environmentally harmful fishing subsidies.

She also is pushing the WTO to fashion a broader response to the pandemic — even though many see any agreement at this point as too little too late — and to issue a statement aimed at keeping food flowing across borders by discouraging export restrictions.

To accomplish that, she’ll have to bring every country on board — or at least persuade them not to voice their objections — because of the consensus-based nature of WTO rulemaking. Failure to do so could reinforce the idea that the WTO is incapable of reaching big deals involving all 164 members or addressing tough issues like climate change.

U.S.-China tensions are playing out in the Covid-19 vaccine talks, where the United States wants Beijing specifically excluded from using the proposed agreement to make generic versions of foreign vaccines, such as those produced by Moderna and Pfizer.

They’re also on display in the fishing subsidy talks, where Washington is pushing for countries to agree on a provision that would require WTO members to report annually on what they know about the use of forced labor in the seafood sector.

India, meanwhile, has issues that it is pursuing in a number of the negotiations that could frustrate efforts to reach agreement. One of its demands could lead to the end of a 24-year-old moratorium on the collection of duties on digital goods such as movies, software and video games, as well as an array of digitally-enabled services.

Members have also been fighting over the wording of a paragraph to set the stage for discussion for modernizing the WTO’s underlying rules.

Most countries favor a “streamlined” WTO reform statement containing three elements: a recognition of the broad consensus on the need for reform, the need for the process to be transparent and inclusive, and the need for it to address the interests of all members.

But India and a few other members favor a more prescriptive, strictly multilateral reform process that would open up the opportunity to revise the Marrakesh Agreement establishing the WTO. “It’s an agenda going backwards and reopening what we negotiated 30 years ago,” a Geneva-based trade official said.

That disagreement just further illuminates how hard it is to make progress in an institution that requires complete unanimity to operate, and why members like the United States and the EU are increasingly attracted to plurilateral pacts among smaller groups of WTO members rather than the entire organization.

Adding to the nervousness: The WTO has a history of producing big flops at its ministerial meetings, including spectacular meltdowns in Seattle in 1999 and Cancún in 2003. The group’s last ministerial conference in Buenos Aires in 2017 ended without any tangible outcome.

“I view it as a moment of truth for the WTO,” said Wendy Cutler, a former senior U.S. trade negotiator who now is vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

If trade ministers leave Geneva next week with nothing to show for their efforts, that would accelerate “a trend we’re already beginning to see where countries want to work with other like-minded countries to set the rules,” Cutler said. “The WTO rules have kept everyone in the same room, and as the WTO becomes less and less productive and efficient, its ability to be relevant in this complex, complicated world diminishes.”

Kelly Ann Shaw, a former Trump administration trade official now at Hogan Lovells law firm, agreed: “If they can’t even agree on language just directing countries to think about WTO reform, it’s really hard to think about how they’re actually going to reform it.”

Just days ahead of the meeting, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai was cautious about the chances for big breakthroughs at MC12.

“There are a lot of conversations, important ones, that we need to advance. Whether or not we can get them across the finish line, I don’t know,” Tai said on Monday at an event hosted by the Washington International Trade Association. “But it is really important for us to have MC12. And then it is really important for us to wake up the day after MC12 and feel like we have a vision for what we would like MC13 to be.”

Critics complain that the Biden administration has done little to shape that vision, aside from a speech Tai gave last year, where she repeated U.S. complaints about the WTO’s dispute settlement system and urged members “to start actually listening to each other” instead of spouting their favorite talking points.

“Historically, officials from the U.S. Trade Representative Office have worked diligently, often behind the scenes, to bring the members to positive outcomes,” Bill Reinsch, a trade policy specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently wrote. “That does not seem to be the case this time around.”

Despite that, even modest progress would provide a shot in the arm for a world that is becoming less and less stable.

“If we invest in it now and reaffirm its centrality to more multilateral trade cooperation, then it becomes possible in the future to expand the agenda,” Yerxa said.

 

domingo, 3 de junho de 2018

Richard Cobden: o apostolo do livre comercio, citações - Gary M. Galles (FEE)

Peace, Harmony, and Free Trade: 10 Uplifting Quotes by Richard Cobden, the Shining Knight of Classical Liberalism

Cobden recognized free trade as the key to creating material prosperity.

June 3rd marks the 1804 birth of “the Apostle of Free Trade,” Richard Cobden. He earned that name spearheading the campaign against England’s protectionist Corn Laws, whose repeal in 1846 spread liberalized trade through much of Europe. Some have said free markets owe him their existence.
Cobden recognized free trade as the key to creating material prosperity. But far more, he emphasized the moral superiority of free trade over the injustice of protectionism, in which government uses its power to help one group by unjustifiably harming others. Further, he saw that markets’ exclusively voluntary arrangements formed the basis of peace. As Jim Powell described the ensuing period of liberalized trade:
"Peace prevailed, in large part, because non-intervention became the hallmark of foreign policy...There was unprecedented freedom of movement for people, goods, and capital...Trade expanded, strengthening the stake that nations had in the continued prosperity of one another as customers and suppliers. While free trade was never a guarantee of peace, it reduced the danger of war more than any public policy ever had."
In an era of occasional trade liberalization, but a great deal of protectionism for government favorites, along with too little reliable peace, Cobden still has much to teach us.
"The progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of trade, and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices."
"Protection...takes from one man’s pocket, and allows him to compensate himself by taking an equivalent from another man’s pocket…a clumsy process of robbing all to enrich none, and ties up the hands of industry in all directions."
"Holding…eternal justice to [include] the inalienable right of every man freely to exchange the result of his labor for the productions of other people, and maintaining the practice of protecting one part of the community at the expense of all other classes to be unsound and unjustifiable...carry out to the fullest extent...the true and peaceful principles of Free Trade, by removing all existing obstacles to the unrestricted employment of industry and capital."
"Look not to the politicians; look to yourselves."
"Free trade is a principle which recognizes the paramount importance of individual action."
"Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less."
"[We] advocated Free Trade, not merely on account of the material wealth which it would bring to the community, but for the far loftier motive of securing permanent peace between nations."
"Our principle...would bring peace and harmony among the nations."
"People…must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each others’ wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race…no other plan is worth a farthing."
"I see in the Free-Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism…and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace...man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of one’s labor with his brother man...the speculative philosopher of a thousand years hence will date the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history from the triumph of the principle."
Richard Cobden knew that free trade was the natural result of self-ownership and voluntary arrangements, which produced justice by preventing government-sponsored robbery by some from others. He knew that it broke down privilege and barriers hindering economic progress and replaced them with mutually beneficial relations among participants. In a world far from that ideal, we should remember Cobden’s wisdom that emancipating commerce would expand both economic progress and peace.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

sexta-feira, 8 de dezembro de 2017

Ludwig von Mises: um texto de 1942, recentemente traduzido para o ingles


Ideas on Postwar Economic Policy


December 8, 2017
 
Mises Institute-Peru is proud to present this English-language version of an article written by Ludwig von Mises that, until now, was only available in Spanish. The text was translated by Lucas Ghersi.
This article was first published in the Mexican journal Cuadernos Americanos, Mexico, Year 1, vol. 4, July-August 1942.  According to Bettina Bien Greaves’ bibliography, an English or German version of this text is not known (Mises: An Annotated Bibliography, p. 46).  It is likely that the Spanish version was translated from English, but an original draft in German cannot be ruled out.

I
We hope that one day this awful war will end and men may, once again, occupy themselves with the works of peace. Then, the production of arms and other instruments of crime will be substituted by the production of consumer goods for men, women and children. No longer will people think in annihilation and destruction but in establishing and increasing human wellbeing.
This return to peace, of course, presupposes the absolute annihilation of the totalitarian powers since, if the dictators were to prevail, the consequence of their victory would not be peace but unending warfare. In these totalitarian powers, a philosophy that proclaims war, instead of peace, is defended as the natural most desirable state for men that will provide them with joy. Their longing is not permanent peace but permanent war; thus, if they achieve triumph, the world will become a great slaughterhouse.
However, the dictators will succumb; therefore, the question is:
What must we do to close, as soon and as thoroughly as possible, the wounds opened in society during these years of fighting? This is the great problem that should worry us and that will never concern us prematurely. Even now, when the roar of battle is still being heard, statesmen and economists must think about the last day of the war. Even now they should prepare, in their spirits, what will be necessary to put in practice later.
II
Above all, it is necessary to make this idea clear: if postwar economic policy is to be successful, it must be based on measures radically different from those pursued before the outbreak of this war.
The main characteristic of policies implemented in the decade that preceded the current war, was economic nationalism; that is, an economic policy based on the belief that it is possible to promote the wellbeing of all nationals of a country, or at least of a specific group of them, through measures harmful to foreigners. It was understood that deterring or prohibiting, in an absolute way, the importation of foreign goods; restricting the immigration of aliens; or expropriating, partially or totally, the capital owned by foreigners could provide an important service to a country. This is not the appropriate place to analyze if those measures are suitable to achieve their desired end. The classical economic theory of free exchange has already proven, beyond refutation, that the final result of restrictions placed on foreign trade is the general decline of the productivity of labor and, therefore, of standards of living. In this way, production ceases to occur in places where a high return may be achieved and moves to others where, with the same investment of capital and labor, much lower returns can be obtained. The classic doctrine of free exchange of Hume, Smith and Ricardo has never been refuted. All objections to it turned out to be unfounded.
However, protectionism not only creates economic disadvantages. It also precludes peaceful cooperation between states leading to a sure war. The Society of Nations’ efforts to stop the new global conflagration, through a system of collective security, were in vain because of this environment since all states, big or small, tended to harm one another by implementing certain economic measures.
If we are unable to overcome economic nationalism, all hopes of achieving the reconstruction of our culture will prove illusory. Economic nationalism prevents industrialized States ¾ that is, all those that are compelled to import foodstuff and raw materials ¾ from gathering the necessary means to pay for their imports. How would they be able to pay if not through the exportation of their industrial products? If not permitted to export their industrial articles, these states would be fatally forced into autarchy; on the other hand, countries that possess raw materials would loose markets for the produce of their land. In industrialized states, this situation provokes the desire to dominate nations that possess raw materials through military means. We must not fool ourselves: ambitions of conquest lie behind apparently innocent claims for the equal distribution of natural sources of wealth and free access to raw materials.
In a peaceful world ruled by free trade, there would be no problems regarding raw materials. Each country would be able to buy all the raw materials it could pay for in international markets. In a world subject to protectionism things happen in a very different way: in this world the problem of raw materials cannot disappear; and for small countries, that is those that are weaker militarily, having mines or a fertile soil within their borders represents a danger.
All arguments regarding the advantages of peace, international cooperation, the creation of a society of nations and the reconstruction of the world economy are hollow words if there is the intention of preserving protectionism. If one is not willing to renounce economic nationalism, small states will lose their autonomy and become the vassals of strong militaristic states. Coalitions of Great Powers, armed to the teeth, will confront one another and take advantage of any momentary weakness of their adversaries to undertake new campaigns of conquest.
It is necessary to understand that this new World War (as well as the First World War) is not the consequence of a natural catastrophe unleashed upon innocent men; rather, it is the inevitable result of the nationalist economic policy pursued in the preceding decades. In a world were free trade prevails, despite the dynamism of Hitler or Mussolini, reaching a state of war would not have been possible. Evil men will always exist; however, it is important to create an economic order in which their power to do harm is reduced to a minimum.
In summary, without the eradication of economic nationalism, it will not be possible to return to peace and wellbeing.
III
The main problem of the postwar era will be general poverty; that is, the shortage of capital.
In the last decade, politics seemed uninterested in the problem of formation and maintenance of capital. Governments acted as if the availability of greater or lesser amounts of capital for production had no importance for the wellbeing of the people. Through their policy of taxes and public spending, these governments not only slowed down the formation of capital but also ¾ at least in recent years and in many countries ¾ caused the consumption of available capital. Thus, they did not practice a policy aimed at increasing general prosperity and raising standards of living but one aimed towards the impoverishment of the people. After the end of the current war, it will not be possible to maintain this policy unless we deliberately seek the destruction of what we nowadays call Western Civilization.
What made possible the development of this civilization, the greatest that has ever existed, was precisely, at least regarding economics, the continued accumulation of capital goods. In the days before this time of world wars and dictatorships, a greater number of people lived, including in this Western Civilization, than in the days before the Industrial Revolution; and each of these men lived much better than their ancestors a century or two before. Each year brought rising living standards for the masses; each year, new products became available for the average man, which made his life healthier, more agreeable, and more stimulating. Contemporary men would find the life of the nobility in pre-capitalist times indignant, not to mention the living conditions of the commoners.
All of these increases in living standards are due to the fact that, year after year, production exceeded consumption. The surplus was gathered and invested; that is used to develop the production apparatus. In this way, means of transportation were developed and new installations were created to achieve a better and cheaper production of all sorts of goods for consumption. The individual labor of each man yields more today because, for a given quantity of labor, there is a much greater quantity of capital goods than before. Thus, the marginal productivity of labor has been growing and, consequently, real wages have increased. If the standard of living of the masses has increased, it was because the supply of capital in the economy surpassed population growth.
But the masses did not only benefit from the increase of real wages: the modern organization of financial techniques, of systems of credit and of joint stock companies enabled these very masses to become owners of capital. Most holders of deposits in saving banks, bonds and insurance policies are even members of the working class. In a capitalist state, thrift and the formation of new capitals are not the privilege of a minority, but are generalized; and their fruits, in one way or another, benefit everyone.
Governments and politicians have refused to recognize that the increase of capital is the lifeline of economic progress; on the contrary, they made everything they could to take away people`s desire for thrift. They confiscated part of that capital through taxes and impaired small savings by means of inflation. They carried out expropriations thus eroding the stocks of capital that had been achieved.
As an example, we can mention the way Hitler acted in relation to German railroads in the Reich. A long time before the First World War, diverse German states ¾ Prussia, Bavaria, etc. ¾ bought railroads built with private capitals, paying for them with bonds. Since these bonds lost their value due to inflation, in a way, the Government acquired these railroads for free. Hitler managed this vast supply of capital, equivalent to more than 60,000 kilometers of rail, in the most irresponsible way. He did not substitute vehicles (locomotives and railcars) that had been worn out by use, nor did he maintain rails and signal equipment as it would have been convenient; he also completely unattended fixed equipment. The situation is similar in the railroads of southern and eastern Europe. When the current war is over, the greater part of the railroads of Europe will be a heap of stones and scrap metal. In this way, capital worth thousands of millions has been consumed in the strictest sense of the word.
The destruction of capital caused by the war far surpasses that which happened before the war. When the struggle is over, we will see everywhere huge installations dedicated to the production of arms and other materials for war, however these installations cannot be utilized for the production of the goods that are required in peacetime. The capital immobilized in them will be lost and, instead, there will be lack of capital where it is most necessary. Old installations meant to produce goods necessary in peacetime will be useless, either because they have been converted to serve the needs of rearmament, or because they have been ruined after several years of disuse.
IV
What could we do to alleviate this shortage of capital as quickly as possible?
There is only one solution: to produce more than what is consumed; that is, practice thrift and, in this way, form new capital. The more one produces, and the higher the proportion of that production that is invested rather than consumed, the sooner the hard times of capital shortage will be over. All those that propose solutions different from the one explained above are either fooling themselves or trying to fool others.
There are no magical financial procedures to remedy the shortage of capital. The expansion of credit cannot alleviate it and much less, suppress it. On the contrary, the boom artificially produced by the expansion of credit creates distortion and, therefore, a waste of capital by immediately promoting overconsumption; that is, the reduction of capital. Inflationist experiments will only make the ailment worse. What is necessary in this case is, precisely, a monetary and credit policy that guarantees the stability of monetary value.
Governments will have to renounce to all confiscatory measures: they will have to radically change their tax policy.
In many countries, taxes on rent and inheritance have been transformed into ill-disguised measures of confiscation. The continuity of this system is not compatible with the existence of private property and is pointless unless we wished to transit to a communist regime and make standards of living fall to the permanent state of misery that prevails among the Russian masses. Within the limits of a non-communist system, these measures only produce an effect of immobility and destruction. They stimulate the consumption of capital since; what logic is there in thrift for a man who knows that only a small part of his inheritance will go to the hands of his children?
If we wished to preserve an income tax, it would be necessary to transform it into a tax on consumed rent. Incomes that are not consumed, but saved and invested, should be exempt from all taxation since it is of public interest to form as much new capital as possible.
All large corporations are developed through the consumption of only a small part of their profits and the investment of the rest. Due to the simultaneous existence of national and local duties, the current system increased the taxation of larger incomes to rates of 100% or more. This system makes it impossible to create new industries or develop those that already exist. For the benefit of the North American people, the development of corporations that supply markets with a variety of cheap goods did not stop some years ago; however, current efforts to prevent new competitors from emerging cause harm to consumers while granting unjustified protection to the incapable heirs of existing corporations. Tax legislation, considered by its supporters to be in favor of the people, only produces the antisocial effect of hindering the supply of consumer goods.
The decrease of government revenue, as an inevitable consequence of these reforms in the tax system, must be compensated with the restriction of public spending. It is necessary to break free, once and for all, from the illusion that the State has money for everything and everyone. The State cannot give to somebody what it has previously not taken away from others. In order to plan the State’s expenses, it is necessary to carefully assess whether the profits to be obtained from the desired expense are more beneficial than the required increase in taxation and its economic consequences are harmful. It will no longer be possible to give away subsidies or issue bonds to finance the reelection of members of parliament. It will be necessary to return to the economic management of old parliaments, which understood that an ordered budget is preferable to the supposed happiness of leveled budgets.
Capital shortage will probably be less severe in the United States of America than in the British Empire and less oppressive there then in the European continent. In central, eastern and southern Europe, the situation will be completely catastrophic. The industrialized nations of Europe, the most densely populated places on earth, cannot feed their people without exporting the products of their industry, which are largely manufactured from imported raw materials. Those countries will be forced to compete in global markets with their industrialized products and this will not be done successfully unless they rebuild their apparatus of production, which was destroyed by hostile policies towards capital in the previous era and by the war itself, to the levels of capital that existed before the outbreak of the war. They will have to completely renovate their transport infrastructure and the machinery of their factories; in other words, completely address all the problems of industrial production again. But before achieving it, they will have to endure years or decades of hunger and misery.
It is clear that, in these circumstances in Europe, particularly in central and southern Europe, the activities of labor unions will not be possible for a long time. The tendency of labor unions to forcefully obtain higher wages and shorter working hours for their members, through unionist means, must be forgotten wherever capital is completely lacking. Workers will have to satisfy themselves with a job that can protect them from misery. To whom will they address their complaints in a country where there is no capital to set industry in motion? Low salaries, low standards of living, and a general decline of culture: these are the sad but inevitable consequences of the shortage of capital.
When they notice the pitiful luck of their European peers, North American workers must realize that they have effective means to remedy the situation: opening up American borders to European immigration would create a tendency to equate the level of European wages to those of the United States. However, if restrictions to immigration persist, wages in Europe, where natural conditions of production will be worst and capital shortage most acute, will be much lower than those in North America.
Thus, it is clear that, after the war, the shortage of capital will produce radical changes in domestic policy. Now we shall examine what the consequences will be regarding foreign policy.
V
The development of international markets for capital and currency during the 19th century was a great achievement of far reaching worldwide political consequence. The peoples of Western Europe, which where the first to create political and economic institutions favorable to the formation and conservation of capital, made part of their wealth available to less favored nations through a system of credit. The excess savings of Europe where invested around the world and helped the peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia overcome their state of economic backwardness; it also provided Americans and Australians with the means necessary to exploit the riches of their land. European culture provided all humanity, not only the fruits of modern technique, but also the material means to transform the economy according to the demands of modern technique. Billions poured from Europe (and later also from the United States) to all the countries of the earth and, as payment, European capitalists, men of business and thrift, received property rights and industrial values.
This international organization of credit is now in ruins; the same countries that, once, prospered because of it have destroyed it. Neither the debts’ interest nor their principals were paid either because debtors openly defaulted on their obligations or because governments cancelled the rights of creditors through inflation or currency controls. Businesses belonging to foreigners were expropriated or taxed in such a way that their owners where left with nothing but hollow legal titles. Creditors and foreign capitalists have been completely dispossessed of their rights.
In these circumstances we cannot expect that, after the war, the least ruined countries will make their capital available to the most ruined. The experience of capitalists and businessmen, regarding the concession of credit and participation in foreign ventures, is sufficiently explicit for them to feel inclined to expose themselves to the dangers of such adventures. Maybe the United States, motivated by old friendships, will invest some capital in Anglo-Saxon countries or in Mexico, as help to a neighbor. However, even this is doubtful since American trade unions tend to regard exports of capital as contrary to their interests and, therefore, demand measures aimed at preventing them. In any case, it is certain that other peoples will not expect foreign capital, to help rebuild their economies, unless the dire condition of foreign capitalists changes radically.
Energetic reforms in international law are necessary to set the international mechanisms of capital and credit in motion again. Only states willing to accept great restriction on their sovereignty can hope to obtain credit or direct investment from abroad. In all matters related to foreign capital, these states will have to renounce their autonomy in favor of the Society of Nations; that is, in all that affects monetary and credit policy as well as mercantile and fiscal powers over foreign capital, they will have to submit unconditionally to the jurisdiction of international courts and tolerate the decisions of those courts to be executed through an international coercive power.
Undoubtedly, all this may seem very strange and the leaders of most states will simply consider it unacceptable. But, above all, it is necessary to consider two things: firstly, every state will be free to submit or not to these conditions and to accept or decline the assistance of foreign capital; secondly, it is inevitable to liquidate a conception of state sovereignty that is no longer in harmony with current circumstances. In no way is it possible to accept that cases such as those of Austria, Albania or Ethiopia can repeat themselves. Great Powers must award effective protection to small states from violations such as these. The ambitions of states that secretly practice a policy of rearmament must be contained through an international police force. It will be necessary to treat governments that disturb the peace in the same way as bandits and murderers are treated within states. By establishing such a system, restrictions of sovereignty regarding financial and fiscal policy will not seem intolerable and much will have been gained.
However, we must point out that all these measures will not be able to completely remedy the shortage of capital. What may be achieved is a more equitable distribution of existing capital and with this much will have been gained.
VI
After the current war, the world will not be a paradise. Men will be poor and have to endure the spiritual and moral consequences of poverty.
Not all peoples will suffer in the same way the consequences of war. Latin American countries will probably be among the least affected ones. Thus, their backwardness in relation to Anglo-Saxon countries will be compensated in part. A new era will begin in which the handicap of Latin America will be smaller.
The supposed backwardness of Central and Southern America, that always made ordinary Cook tourists smile compassionately, was only due to the shortage of capital in those countries. Since capitalism reached Latin America two centuries late in relation to other countries, certain institutions familiar elsewhere were lacking in the region. The low level was not moral or intellectual: it was nothing else than a relatively higher shortage of capital.
But now, more or less, all countries will begin again; and, therefore, with the passing of the years, these differences may gradually fade. Through a wise economic policy, it may be possible that Latin American countries can conquer the place in the World Economy to which they are predestined by the genius and industry of their citizens and the wealth of their land. 

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises's writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called "praxeology."

sábado, 21 de outubro de 2017

A eterna luta entre o comerciante e o burocrata - Guglielmo Palombini (Mises Institute)

The Eternal Struggle Between the Merchant and the Bureaucrat

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Translated from the Italian by
[This article has been translated from Piombini's Italian original by Bernardo Ferrero.]
https://mises.org/blog/eternal-struggle-between-merchant-and-bureaucrat

Before the State

For a very extended period of time primitive men lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers at a time in which there was no state. The modus vivendi of these clans was such that after having exhausted all nature-given resources in a particular area, they would move elsewhere in search of other available food supplies. This system of nomadic life could endure as long as the human race was limited and the vast majority of land remained uninhabited. Yet, this lifestyle was not sustainable, and within a short period of time the intensification of these hunting activities provoked an ecological crisis that spread across Europe, the Middle East and America, causing the extinction of 32 animal species [that had been an important food source].
The disappearance of the megafauna inaugurated, around the year 10,000 B.C. the transition to a mode of production based on agriculture. The Neolithic revolution could in fact be described as the pragmatic response to the exhaustion of resources that resulted from the intensified exploitation of the system based on hunting and gathering. Even though the lives of the farmers were admittedly harder than those of the hunters, requiring long and heavy hours of labor in the fields, the sedentary life of the village made it possible for a far greater number of mouths to be fed: thanks to appropriations and to the cultivation of land, the human population increased considerably, giving birth to the first civilizations.

The Violent Origins of the State

According to historian William Durant:
Agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of chase, and hardly more perilous, when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.
The first states emerged when these nomadic tribes of hunters and herders understood that the systematic exploitation of agricultural villages through taxation constituted a far more efficient and lucrative system than the old one of plunder and extermination. That the state was born in a brutal fashion is confirmed by every historical and anthropological research. On this matter, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
a race of conquerors which, aggressive, powerful and organized, pounces with its most horrid claws on an unsuspecting population, one which in numbers may be tremendously superior, but is still undisciplined and nomadic. Such is the origin of the ‘"state."
According to Sociologist Lester Ward,
The state as distinct from tribal organization begins with the conquest of one race by another.
Similarly, wrote the Austrian general and sociologist Gustav Ratzenhofer,
Violence is the agent which has created the state.
and as Franz Oppenheimer observed,
Everywhere we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.
The concept of State above mentioned is meant in a sociological, rather than in a political sense. In the field of political science one intends the state to be a particular type of political organization that emerged in Europe at the end of the middle ages. According to the more generic definition used in sociology, instead, one talks about the existence of a state whenever society is divided in two distinct classes: a productive majority who gets by through the employment of economic means (production and exchange) and a ruling elite who gets by through the employment of political means (taxation and expropriation). The typical order of a state and the inevitable division in social classes which defines it emerge simultaneously, according to sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, in that very crucial historical instant in which for the first time the conqueror decides to save the conquered from immediate annihilation in order to exploit him permanently in the years to come.

The Struggle between Merchants and Bureaucrats Begins

From that moment onwards, writes the anthropologist Marvin Harris, producers have precipitated in a dramatic condition of servitude from which they have never really escaped:
For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grove, kneel and kowtow. In many ways, the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.
The birth of the state was then accompanied by a real class struggle between producers and bureaucrats, a struggle which to a great extent remains alive to this day: while the first group desires to keep the fruits of its own labor, the second aspires to come into possession of those fruits through force and inaugurate a system of rule and exploitation. The eternal conflict throughout history is therefore that between men of freedom and men of administration, between social power on the one hand and state power on the other. As will be illustrated in the examples that follow, the progress or decadence of civilization are determined by the trend of this struggle.

Societies of Bureaucrats

1. The Ancient Empires
Since the early days of recorded History, the great majority of people lived miserably under the most tyrannical empires (the Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Persian, Indian, Late-Roman, Arab, ottoman, Incas, Aztec) which extended themselves across large areas. In these ancient empires progress was so slow as to go unnoticed and the reasons for such stagnation were the following: Political power in those empires did not have any need to innovate, rather innovation was fought due to the fear that new discoveries would disrupt the established system; the bureaucratic and military elite that ruled used to come into possession, through force, of every surplus of production repressing every small sign of resistance; every autonomous social force was nipped in the bud and nothing escaped the control of the despot who was the absolute owner of all goods of the reign and of all its inhabitants; finally the people were submitted not only to a confiscatory level of taxation but to forced labor for the construction of grandiose public works such as canals, city walls, pyramids and buildings.
These ancient empires were agglomerates of illiterate peasants who toiled from the morning to the night just to be able to provide for themselves vegetables without protein. Not surprisingly, they were not in a much better condition than their oxen, and at the same time they were completely subjugated to the commands of their superiors who could read and who were the only ones possessing the right of manufacturing and using war like instruments. The fact that these societies have lasted thousands of years sounds like a severe warning: there is no intrinsic force to human activities that can assure material and moral progress.
2. A Perfect Example: the Chinese Empire
The millenary empire of China can serve as a typical example of a closed society, that was completely dominated by a cast of intellectuals and bureaucrats. As the greatest historian of ancient China, Etienne Balasz, has explained, the Confucian state was decisively totalitarian. No private initiative was allowed and no expression of the public life could escape official regulation: clothing, private and public constructions, music, parties, and even the colors that one was allowed to wear were subject to the rigid control of the state. In addition, there were prescriptions of birth and death and the state surveilled with terrifying attention every step of its subjects, from the cradle to the grave.
China in the days of the mandarins was an environment of changeless patterns, routines, characterized by traditionalism and immobility and therefore suspicious towards any possible kind of innovation and initiative, let alone free research and entrepreneurship. The ingenious and inventive spirit that was not foreign to the Chinese would have doubtlessly enriched the country, but it was the state that impeded the country to embark upon an age of technical progress and economic development, by crushing every kind of private initiative just because it was thought to collide with the interests of the bureaucratic cast.
It is not surprising that throughout Chinese history technical and economic progress have coincided only with those phases of relative weakness of the central power, like in the period of the warring states (453-221 B.C), probably the richest and most brilliant of all Chinese history, or the period of the three reigns (220-280 A.D.). Even after 907 A.D. when the Tang dynasty collapsed and the period of endless wars for supremacy began, during the so-called period of the five dynasties and the five reigns, the country experimented a striking explosion of inventions and prosperity due to the lack of centralization.
3. A Modern Case: The Soviet Union
In our epoch, communist regimes have brought back, albeit in a bloodier form, the totalitarian control that was so characteristic of the ancient oriental despotisms. Marxist ideology with its radical hostility towards property, commerce and free enterprise, revealed itself to be the most suitable paradigm in satisfying the will to power of the parasitic classes. In every country where the political and bureaucratic classes have sought to destroy the productive sector, they have found it useful to uphold Marxist ideology as their mantra.
The extreme exploitation perpetrated by the communist bureaucracies against the productive classes, which in the case of the kulaks reached the stage of physical extermination, was denounced by Lev Trotzkij, Ante Ciliga, Milovan Gilas, Mihail Voslensky. Yet the most penetrating and most insightful analysis of the bureaucratic exploitation that took place under communism has come to us from the works of Bruno Rizzi, an ingenious, self-taught Italian scholar. Rizzi was arguably the first to comprehend that a parasitic class of bureaucrats had taken power in 1917, composed as he wrote of “state officials, policeman, writers, union mandarins and all the communist party in block” that kept plundering the workers in the most ferocious way ever to be seen.
The post-1917 Soviet State, Rizzi noted, had been drastically inflated. The bureaucrats with their respective families constituted a mass of 15 million people who had stuck to the upper levels of the administrative throne with the only job of sucking a great portion of the national product. In the Kolchoz, the state owned agricultural enterprises, only 37% of production remained in the hands of the workers, while the remaining went to the state who then turned it over to the bureaucracy. State functionaries, in addition, continuously made deals at the expense of ordinary citizens by fixing wages and prices for various products and by treating the “workers” as its “forced clients”, obliging them to acquire products in state owned stores with a markup that at times reached 120%.
Officials of the state in addition, obtained notable advantages by being able to destine many of the accumulated capital funds, set aside for the construction of public works, in projects that went to the exclusive benefit of their own class, a lucid example being the headquarters of the bureaucracy, the sumptuous 360 meter’s tall house of the soviets (the workers, meanwhile, had to cope with a home that was 5 meters squared on average). By having total control of the economic levers, guaranteed by an extremely invasive police state in the USSR, the bureaucracy was really omnipotent and every action on her part was aimed at maintaining its political hegemony and its well-established economic privileges.

Societies of Merchants

1. The Phoenicians and the Greeks
Around the year 1200 B.C. the empires of the bronze age (the Egyptian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Hittite and Assyrian empires) succumbed into a period of stagnation caused by the progressive suffocation of productive and mercantile activities. The crisis of the central powers gave freedom of action to certain commercial people in the Middle East coming mainly from modern Lebanon, who, with their ships, began to sail the sea transporting goods and products of any kind. For the first time in history one saw the development, in the Mediterranean basin, of a catallactic system based on an integrated division of labor where markets and ports began to grow up to the point of becoming established cities. Commerce soon became the fly wheel of innovation: The Philistines invented iron; the Canaanites the alphabet; the Phoenicians discovered glass and at the same time improved boats, navigational knowledge and accounting systems.
“In truth, writes Matt Ridley, was there ever a more admirable people than the Phoenicians?” Those ancient merchants connected not only the entire Mediterranean, but also the accessible coasts of the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the overland routes of Asia, and yet they never had an emperor and never participated in a memorable battle. In order to prosper the Phoenician cities of Tyre, Byblos, Sidon, Carthage and Gadir did not feel the need of uniting into a single political entity, and therefore never went beyond a very modest federation.
In the words of Matt Ridley:
The Phoenician diaspora is one of the great untold stories of history- untold because Tyre and its books were so utterly destroyed by thugs like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Alexander, and Carthage by the Scipios, so the story comes to us only through snippets from snobbish and envious neighbors.
Even the Greek miracle confirms the important lesson, first formulated by David Hume, that political fragmentation, by putting a break on the extension of political power, is the real ally of economic progress. The extraordinary dissemination of prosperity and of Greek culture between the years 600 B.C. and 300 B.C presents us with a development similar to that of the Phoenician cities: Miletus, Athens and the other hundred independent cities of Magna Grecia, enriched themselves through the extension of commercial relationships without being part of a single empire. Furthermore, the circulation of ideas that the increased trade made possible, gave birth to the grandiose discoveries of the time. The lesson of the Greek miracle is the following: It is always the merchant who opens the door to the philosopher, not the other way around, by enriching the city and opening it, through foreign trade, to new ideas. Unfortunately, this period of Greek enlightenment died out as soon as new empires began to ascend: first the Athenian, then the Macedonian, and ultimately the Roman.
2. The Communes of Medieval Europe
The fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. represented the luckiest event in the history of the old continent. Thanks to circumstances that one could describe as miraculous, Europe never returned to being a unified political entity, after the repeated failures of Charlemagne and the Germanic emperors. The lack of political unity enabled a widespread social experimentation that unleashed into a creative competition between thousands of independent political units of which the byproduct was rapid economic, social and cultural progress. The weakness of the central authority favored the cities which became the leaders in the 11th century of a political and commercial revolution that would mark the European institutional setting for centuries to come. In fights that lasted even hundreds of years, the inhabitants of the cities escaped the dominion of emperors and feudal lords, rebuilding society through self-government from the bottom up. The inhabitants of these communes oriented themselves toward the economy and not toward politics because, unlike those of the ancient cities they lacked a great mass of slaves at their disposal: they found themselves forced to abandon predation (which had been the common means of increasing one’s own well-being up to those days) and engage in manufacturing activities and commerce. In this manner, the medieval bourgeois extended the market economy beyond the limits of the feudal world and by the year 1200 A.D. Europe was a region inundated by working men, farmers, entrepreneurs, artisans and merchants who exchanged the fruits of their own labor at the many annual fairs: this was a very different scenario from the one that prevailed in other areas of the civilized world, where the masses continued to be subjugated by omnipotent imperial bureaucracies.
3. 3 Modern Cases: Holland, England, and the United States
In the 17th century the incredible success of the little country of Holland and the disastrous ruin of the Spanish empire, stands to confirm, in the eyes of contemporary historians, the superiority of the commercial society over the bureaucratic one. In Spain, during those years, a new anti-bourgeois ideology had developed among its elite, an ideology that saw with great scorn and contempt the accumulation of wealth through value enhancing work. The Spanish bureaucratic state as a consequence began to be directed by men who were completely foreign to the world of economics and business and who pushed the country into adopting economic policies that played out to be a disaster for commerce and industry.
In the United Provinces at the time, matters were different. Laissez-faire was a consolidated and fully legitimized praxis, and the success that Holland derived from the adoption of free trade caused a mix of admiration, amazement, and envy all around Europe. In 1670, the Dutch were by far the biggest players in the international trade arena to the point that their merchant navy was bigger and mightier than those of France, Scotland, Germany, Spain and Portugal put together. Holland, in the 1600s was a laboratory in which one could observe and study the capitalistic and bourgeois society in its purest form. Its example showed the path toward self-propelled development: ignoring the Dutch reality meant condemning oneself to continued stagnation.
The English were the first to understand how the prosperity of Holland was closely connected to the liberty that individuals and economic agents enjoyed over there, and it was by imitating the Dutch, that they began to build the basis of their world supremacy. In the 19th century then, England adopted unilaterally a series of measures that opened its harbors to the rest of the globe and such a drastic and unprecedented move provoked a reduction of custom tariffs in all major countries, via a competitive process. Finally, humanity was able to experience the birth of a free and authentic market economy that operated internationally: a Phoenician experiment on a planetary scale. Each country that participated in this international division of labor benefited, and this is shown by the fact that the world economy throughout this period grew by 3 times. But It was in the two most free-market countries, namely England and the United States, where economic growth surpassed by far that of the rest of the world: from 1820 to 1913 the gross domestic product of England increased six-fold, while the American one grew by 41 times.
Decisive for the success of Victorian England and the young United States, according to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, was the consolidation at the social level in those years of a bourgeois mentality that praised and honored the common man who created his fortune through work, commitment, creativity and ingenuity. Nothing probably better symbolizes the cultural victory of the productive classes of society than the statue placed in Westminster abbey in 1825 in honor of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

For a Libertarian Historiography

One can therefore see how the great intellectual and material creations that have elevated human civilization through the ages have not been the product of bureaucrats, but of producers, merchants, entrepreneurs, some of whom have been obscured, exploited, mistreated and others who have simply been forgotten. The protagonists of human development are not the emperors, kings, presidents, ministers or generals who most often appear in our conventional history books, but the farmers, artisans, entrepreneurs and merchants who improved the many arts, techniques and professions. The bravest among these have defended freedom and civilization arms in hand, refusing to be subjugated by the powers of their day.
The common thread in human history is the endless conflict between tax payers and tax consumers which brings us to the following conclusion: Libertarian scholars should narrate historical events through the lenses of those men who represented the ideas of freedom, not those of power. Civilization, ought to be remembered, has been edified by those men who have resisted power, not by those who have exercised it.

Guglielmo Piombini is an Italian journalist who has collaborated in various magazines and newspapers including Liberal, il Domenicale, and Elite.  His articles have also appeared at Ludwig von Mises Italia. Piombini is also the founder of Tramedoro: the online platform that provides a detailed overview of every major classic of the social sciences. Specializing in medieval institutions he is the author of the book “Prima dello Stato, il medioevo della liberta” (“Before the State: The Middle Ages Of Liberty”).