Vox Day: Free Trade Violates The Property Rights Of The Nation

Christian libertarian Vox Day turns propertarian arguments against free-traders:

“In the comments, PG constructed an interesting and effective logical argument against free trade, which I have organized thusly:

1. Free traders insist upon the existence of property rights and the sovereign exercise of those rights as axiomatic. From this foundation, they argue that all actions concerning with whom one will trade, regardless of their location or nation, are protected by those property rights and cannot be morally infringed.

2. If a group of people happen to share the rights to a property in an ownership group, they must decide together on how those rights are exercised. No single individual can sell the property or permit its use by others without the agreement of the other rights holders. The ownership group collectively has the right to decide who and what are permitted to enter their property. It is not an infringement of any one owner’s property right if the greater part of the ownership group does not wish to sell the property or to permit entry to certain parties or items.

[Lila: Libertarians and classical liberals would argue that property rights cannot be exercised by an abstract collective entity like “the nation” and can only be exercised unjustly by any government that claims to represent the nation.]

3. A nation is a group of people who share a common property that is delineated by the national borders. This group of people must therefore decide in some consensus manner how the rights to that property are exercised. They can therefore decide who and what are permitted to enter the national property in precisely the same manner that a house-owning group decide who and what are permitted to enter their house. It is not an infringement of any one individual’s property right if the greater part of the nation does not wish to sell the land possessed by the nation or permit entry to certain parties or items.

4. To deny a nation the property right to enact tariffs or refuse permission for goods, capital, or labor to cross its borders, is tantamount to either denying a) property rights or b) the nation’s existence.

[Lila: Rather than enact laws against the property rights of companies wanting to trade under the present “managed trade” regime, it might be more conducive to freedom to undo the subsidies that currently exist, whether in the form of fixed prices, welfare, preferential tax treatment,  or any other grant by the government.  Doing so, would probably make it far less beneficial for some companies to trade, discourage some movements of labor, and generally have the same effect as a sanction or tariff, without needing to invoke group property rights.]

5. However, denying the existence of nations is not only empirically false, it creates a logical contradiction for the free trader because it requires denying the individual property-owner the right to form collective property-ownership groups from which nations are made. The free trade position depends upon the idea that individuals possess property rights, but groups of more than one individual cannot.

6. Therefore, free trade doctrine requires the denial of the very property rights upon which it is founded. As PG correctly concludes, “their whole argument is an outright logical contradiction”.

As evidence in support of PG’s logical construction, I offer the following statements concerning the existence of nations from two champions of the dogma, Mr. Gary North and our own Unger.

North: “Defenders of tariffs present themselves as defenders of the nation, when in fact the nation, from the point of view of economics, is not a collective entity. The nation, from an economic standpoint, is simply a convenient name that we give to people inside invisible judicial lines known as national borders.”

Unger: “I do not consider myself an ‘American’, except as a verbal convenience, or have any care at all for ‘America’.”

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that the mere existence of a nation does not mean that all of its members are voluntary members of it and it cannot be denied that the legitimate property rights of the nation can be abused or ignored just as they are in the case of individual property rights. But PG’s logic suffices to demonstrate that the property rights argument upon which many free traders heavily rely is far from the conclusive one that they believe it to be.”

[Lila: A version of this argument was made by David Boaz in reviewing the movie, Avatar]