Inertia Wins!

The case for free trade needs to be restated frequently. Politicians keep pushing the same protectionist policies, as though maybe this time the results will be different. President Trump copied Herbert Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley tariffs. President Biden is copying Trump’s trade policies. They do this in part because voters want them to. As economist Bryan Caplan has documented, most people have anti-market bias and anti-foreign bias, and vote for candidates who cater to those biases.

That means that year after year, market liberals need to keep making the case for free trade’s benefits for prosperity, peace, and its importance for resiliency against crises and shortages. Lasting change comes from the bottom up, not the top down, so that’s where we need to focus our efforts. The latest attempt at popular persuasion, “The (Updated) Case for Free Trade” by the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carillo Obregon, is worthy of its task. It consists of both a paper and a fantastic website that is worth a scroll.

They hit on several fronts, first by making the economic case for free trade: “The payoff to the United States from expanded trade between 1950 and 2016 was $2.1 trillion, increasing GDP per capita by around $7,000 and GDP per household by around $18,000.” With an economy still feeling the effects of COVID-19 and inflation at a 40-year high, trade’s benefits are essential for millions of families.

They then make the geopolitical case for free trade, as have thinkers from Montesquieu in the 18^th century to former Secretary of State Cordell Hull during World War II. Countries that trade with each other rarely go to war with one another. This, not boosting GDP, was the animating principle behind the post-war rules-based international trading system anchored by General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then the World Trade Organization. Deep trading relationships are also essential for building diplomatic alliances, which are needed today against Russia and China.

Most importantly, they make the moral case for free trade. Too many economists ignore trade’s moral goodness; Lincicome and Obregon emphasize it. Post-WWII trade liberalization was a significant factor in reducing worldwide extreme poverty from 2.2 billion people in 1970 to 705 million in 2015. That’s a two-thirds reduction in absolute terms, even as global population roughly doubled. In percentage terms, the change is even starker. Extreme poverty was 42.6 percent of world population in 1981 and 8.6 percent in 2018. That’s a four fifths reduction in the proportion of people in extreme poverty, in less than 40 years. Never in human history has anything like this ever happened before, and trade is one of the engines behind it.

That progress is measured in dollars, but it’s not really about money. It’s about reducing infant mortality, and sending kids to school instead of to work in the fields. It’s about access to sanitation, electricity, and medical care. It’s about each generation finally living better than the one before it, even in the poorest places on Earth. Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness shows how deeply trade-enabled growth has improved people’s lives. Trade gives people hope, opportunities, and progress.

The authors then make the case against protectionism, which has guided trade policy for both the Biden and Trump administrations. In addition to puncturing myths about manufacturing, the balance of trade, and self-sufficiency, they point to good policies that policy makers should adopt.

Free trade is about more than removing obstacles. It is about creating an institutional structure under which people—not politicians and special interests seeking protection—can cooperate, compete, and resolve disputes in ways that they choose.

Cato’s web team put together an excellent website summarizing the case for free trade; Lincicome and Obregon’s paper is also a good read.

These are not the only resources for people interested in the case for free trade. Iain Murray and I wrote the report “Traders of the Lost Ark” a few years ago. Pierre Lemieux’s What’s Wrong with Protectionism?is a fantastic short book. The magnum opus of America’s complicated relationship with free trade is Doug Irwin’s Clashing Over Commerce, the paperback edition of which blurbs my review on the back cover.

President Biden announced this week a major economic agreement with a dozen countries in the Indo-Pacific region, to be called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Its goal is to provide a larger diplomatic and economic counterweight to China and increase America’s presence in Asia.

At first glance, it seems like an odd move. President Obama had already negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with many of the same countries in IPEF. President Trump pulled out of the TPP when he took office, but all the other member countries continued on without U.S. involvement under the renamed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

Negotiating costs for rejoining TPP/CPTPP would likely be minimal, while the economic benefits of more open trading relationships will help offset America’s high monetary inflation. As a political bonus, President Biden would be undoing a major part of the Trump trade agenda. So why is Biden starting with a new agreement from scratch? I argue that it’s part of a long-term evolution in how governments are treating trade policy.

One difference is that IPEF has a different regional focus. The TPP/CPTPP focuses on the Pacific Rim, so it has members in South and Central America, not just Asia. IPEF focuses on China’s neighbors, most significantly India. America is IPEF’s only non-Asian member. So, the different diplomatic focus explains part of it.

Another factor for choosing IPEF over rejoining TPP/CPTPP is political: It will not require Senate confirmation. That is a large hurdle at any time, but with Republicans likely to take over the Senate, they would be unlikely to give President Biden a victory, despite their sharing a protectionist trade outlook.

But the broader reason, about which I am more concerned, may be mission creep. I will hold off on further judgments on IPEF until more details become public, but the point about trade policy’s loss of focus on trade is important enough to discuss now.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994, was accompanied by side agreements on non-trade issues, specifically environment and labor. This was a first for major trade agreements. Those side agreements are why CEI originally opposed NAFTA. Our analysts at the time favored the free trade parts of the bill, but they did not like the precedent set by the trade-unrelated side agreements. They had a point. In the years that followed, trade-unrelated issues took on greater prominence in new agreements, and their page lengths ballooned accordingly.

By the time President Trump replaced NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), NAFTA’s non-trade side agreements were folded into the main agreement, which is now more than 2,000 pages long. During the Obama era, trade agreements began to lose the word “free” from their names. President Trump took it even further. As I pointed out at the time, “USMCA’s name does not contain the words ‘free’ or ‘trade.’ This is symbolism, but also important.”

It also accurately reflected the contents. This shift in emphasis is why Iain Murray and I came out against USMCA. We liked that it would mostly preserve NAFTA’s zero-tariff relationships with Mexico and Canada, but those were already in place, and all the new trade-unrelated provisions meant more net burdens and more opportunities for cronyism.

IPEF represents the next logical step in that process. Again, details to come. But the administration’s early remarks make it seem that rejoining TPP is not on the agenda and that IPEF will have little to do with trade. At least TPP treated trade relations seriously. USMCA’s bad precedent has likely borne bad fruit.

We’ll soon see what IPEF contains. But if it is a multi-issue thicket of ideological wish list items and special favors for politically connected interest groups, its member countries may end up bickering about small provisions when they should be cooperating on the big picture of building together a counterweight to China.