"a better dream"

In "Wage Policy in Recovery" by H. B. Shaffer (June 21, 1961) under the heading "Risks in Reviving a Protectionist Trade Policy" we read:

Competition from foreign producers encourages affected business and labor groups to press for higher tariff barriers and more rigorous import restrictions of other kinds to protect the domestic market. Yielding to such pressure, to any significant extent, would run counter to the longstanding American policy of encouraging freer trade among non-Communist countries, would invite reprisals restrictive of American sales abroad, and would complicate U.S. participation in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) and in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a newly formed 20-nation economic alliance scheduled to begin operations next September.

What Shaffer is reporting as the source of this problem, as I see it, is "the longstanding American policy of encouraging freer trade". Free trade, in other words, is not good enough; it has to be "freer" -- and we have to encourage that.

We can not abandon the policy or even tone it down a bit because that would interfere with our freer-trade plans for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the OECD. The reason we cannot tone down those plans, in other words, is that we don't want to. 

That was in 1961. But things haven't changed much since then. We use policy to "encourage" certain things, and those things generally come about. If our economy grows worse as a result, perhaps it is because the people who decide what to encourage do so based only on what is best for themselves.

Or maybe they're just wrong.

I am reminded of a better plan proposed by Hayek:

Neither an omnipotent super-state, nor a loose association of “free nations” but a community of nations of free men must be our goal.

I am reminded also of the strategy that would let the Hayek plan succeed:

... if nations can learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy (and, we must add, if they can also attain equilibrium in the trend of their population), there need be no important economic forces calculated to set the interest of one country against that of its neighbours.

 

Free trade, as we know it today, promotes the merging of nation-states into economic communities like the European Union. Such communities in principle are "lovely". But we are finding out the hard way that economic community is not enough to make the plan work. Political unification is also required. So, behind the scenes, the culture is modified until people begin to think in terms of the super-state, to think in terms of "Europe" rather than "France", to think of themselves as Europeans rather than Frenchmen. People are being manipulated to facilitate the progress of the super-state. 

The super-state is promoted as "better for the economy". That is a crock. If you can't fix the economy of a nation-state, you damn sure will not be able to fix the economy of the super-state. If we cannot learn to provide ourselves with adequate employment by our domestic policy at the nation-state level, surely we will never achieve it at the super-state level.

The whole concept of the super-state, in my uneducated opinion, is the product of the mealy minds of the already super-wealthy whose further accumulations are in some small degree hindered by national boundaries and the economic policies they contain. The concept is supported by lesser wealth-holders with unrealistic dreams of super-size wealth, and by those with neither wealth nor a better dream to turn to.

The "omnipotent super-state" that Hayek rejects, I should add, is the same as the "universal state" of Arnold J. Toynbee and the "universal empire" of Carroll Quigley.  This super-state appears late in the Cycle of Civilization, shortly before the Dark Age which brings the cycle to completion.

Is this dire prediction? No. It is only a way of looking at the world. I suppose we could just wait to see if it turns out again to be true -- unless you have something better to do, like calling for change in the policies that promote our continuing decline.