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No nation was ever ruined by trade, stated Benjamin Franklin in the 18 th century. Franklin's maxim is just as true today as it was in the 18 th century in that trade is enriching nearly all nations today. In the past ten years free trade has done more to alleviate poverty than any well-intentioned law, regulation, or social policy in history. Even the United States benefits from opening its markets to free trade. Two epochal forces are sweeping the world today: the spread of new technology and the spread of free markets. Their combined effect has been to let capital, labor, and production move more freely across borders.
This freedom of movement has allowed for a more efficient allocation of resources, which has made for a more productive, wealthy world. Globalization has brought far away communities across the world closer together. It has brought Internet access to Rwanda, CNN to Azerbaijan, Japanese investors to the U. S. It has also brought unprecedented wealth and economic activity. The world is richer than ever, and increased free global trade is one of the main reasons.
The United States has many sources of power in the pursuit of its goals. The global economy demands economic liberalization, greater openness and transparency, and at the very least, accesses to information technology. International economic policies that leverage the advantages of the American economy and expand free trade are the decisive tools in shaping international politics. They permit us to reach out to states as varied as South Africa and India and to engage our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere in a shared interest in economic prosperity. The pro free-trade camp in this country has tried to sell free trade generally, and the WTO in particular, on the grounds that free trade in other countries is a good idea. When other countries drop their trade barriers, American companies export more, and consequently create more export-related jobs.
All true enough, but what free-traders fail to talk about, and their silence is deafening, is that free trade in the United States is a good idea. Proponents of free trade have remained silent in the face of anti-trade claims about job losses and a "race to the bottom. " They have allowed misplaced fears about globalization to spread by default. Trumpeting the prospect of increased exports by U. S. multinationals simply isn't responsive to those fears; indeed, it actually plays to suspicions that the WTO is a front for big corporations that seek to profit at the expense of ordinary Americans. Many people favor freer trade, freer markets in general - not only in international trade but in all kinds of areas - because individuals are considered to be better in making decisions about what they want, how much they " re prepared to pay for it, how they " re going to use their own resources.
Individuals are considered to be better at making these kind of decisions than governments, unions, health services or any of the other institutions we have which set prices and distribute resources. Prices are supposedly the best indicator of the supply of any particular good relative to how much people want of it. If you have a surplus of a good and not many people want it, the price is going to be quite low. If a particular good is in demand, the prices are going to go up. This is a key idea, which lies behind not only trade policy, but also liberalization policies that we " ve seen in most countries around the world over the last 20 years. There are two key conditions for this whole concept to work.
The first one is that there have to be a lot of buyers and sellers, so that no one individual or company can monopolize the market and influence what is produced and consumed, simply on the basis of their own decisions. The second condition is that everybody has to have information - people have to know what's going on in the market. Specifically in relation to trade, the arguments in favor of liberalizing trade are based on the theory that the fewer restrictions there are what companies can do, the more they will produce and the cheaper it will be. If companies are free to trade in any market, then the companies in any particular country will specialize in producing whatever can be produced most cheaply in that country; they will then trade it with other companies for goods that could be produced more cheaply somewhere else. So everyone will get the maximum amount of product for the cheapest possible price.
There are many positives that make free trade in Americas interest. What must be said and argued on behalf of free trade is that a third of the more than 20 million jobs the U. S. economy created the past seven years are linked to exports. President Clinton, the first U. S.
president to address this gathering of political and corporate leaders, credits open markets with fueling the record U. S. expansion that dropped unemployment to a 30 -year low. Officials also argue that by giving Asian, Brazilian and Russian producers someone to sell to, open U. S. markets helped the world avoid an economic crash after recent financial crises.
Free trade has been a hard sell in the United States. Since the late 1970 s, many Americans have seen the rising of foreign imports as a threat to our economy. The theory of free trade might be true, but its not obviously true. In fact, it's counterintuitive. The United States now makes a quarter of its income from trade.
Yet the national numbers mask economic disruption that leaves people fearful. When a job is lost to foreign competition, there's a real victim and a clear cause. When two jobs are gained in its place, the cause is less obvious. Americans can't seem to make up their minds about trade. Those public doubts linger in the midst of the longest peacetime expansion in U. S.
history. They simmer while the country enjoys the lowest poverty rate in 20 years and the highest percentage of home ownership ever. They bubble up even with unemployment at an all-time low for minorities, a 46 -year low for women, a 30 -year low for all Americans. The greatest threat to society right now is that the momentum toward free trade will be reversed.
This century's beginnings reveal how bad the damage can get when no one defends openness: World War and the Great Depression were partly triggered by trade barriers, international mistrust and national self- absorption. The USA...
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Research essay sample on Free Trade In Americas Interest
