That free trade does more harm than good

Chasm

Free trade is a style of macroeconomics where barriers to international trade, such as tariffs or quotas, are reduced to zero, allowing free movement of goods and services across borders. Throughout my arguments I will show you that free trade based on merit is illusionary, how free trade leads to the exploitation of less economically developed countries (LEDCs), and the significant harm it does to developed, rich countries.

The fundamental principle of free trade is that the country which can produce goods at the lowest cost should produce them, trading with countries which have advantages in different goods. This belief in a meritocratic style of efficiency sounds appealing and is the greatest benefit of free trade. ‘If trade is damaging your country you simply have to work harder!’ But if we examined the true reason for trade, we would find it a manipulative web of human misery. Trade happens for two reasons: nefarious governments or human exploitation.

A country needs a comparative advantage, relative to all other countries, in a good to produce it to trade. But these are not just a natural feature of nationalities, there is always manipulative governments behind it. We are governed by the invisible hand of the markets, but even that can be handcuffed by the government. Let us take China, no doubt the example of trade wealth my opponent would reach for. China has a great manufacturing industry, but that is through government rule-breaking at every turn. China’s central bank artificially lowers the value of its currency, meaning the price is artificially lowered. China steals the intellectual property of its rivals to get ahead. China subsidies manufacturing to drive away foreign competitors. It is never a fair fight between the American and Chinese worker, one competes in free trade, the other is backed by the state. Free trade must rely on every nation following its rules. They will never. Free trade does not favour the most efficient, it favours the most underhanded.

For a nation to succeed in trade it needs its government to keep its eye on the ball, but also to turn many blind eyes. Cost is lower for those will the most efficient manufacturing process, but it is lowest for those with the fewest government regulations to follow. The result of this is that the moral vacuum of capitalism is left to run freely. I may now be able to pay next to nothing for clothes, but that is the result of the young child working in the sweat-shop. It is not only labour regulations flouted by those desperate to get ahead in this race to the bottom. China lets its factories create as much pollution as they want. No costs from environmental regulation! No cost to the bottom-line, but a cost of human life. Cancer has now become China’s leading cause of death, spurred on by the lung cancer caused by its new pollution. Algal blooms create dead zones in the oceans around China, life has been sacrificed for profits. It is only once we poison the last river that we will discover that money cannot be eaten.

These problems are insurmountable for any economy wanting to compete in a world of free trade. If they don’t introduce rules the problem gets worse, if they do there is always another country willing to betray them for an imported 30 pieces of silver. The climate is a problem of existential threat for humanity. Our drive for international trade and lose regulation will only make it worse. Are we really to be the species that drove itself extinct over slips of green paper and small shiny bits of metal? We make the rich richer, but is that fact going to be appreciated by the famished child worker? Will they be happy with their short, prospect-less life knowing that they were able to let me upgrade my iPhone every year? Absolutely not! If we cannot say that they are, we must reach the conclusion that free trade does more harm than it does good. Therefore, I implore you to support this motion.

Chasm

I would like to address the arguments from round 1. While my cross-examination contains many of my points, I will make a summary rebuttal now. Let us imagine a business which advertised in its window this special offer: half-price to any murderers. We would no doubt be put off from buying from this business, certainly, we would never commit murder to receive the discount. This shows the flaw my opponent has made in his arguments, to confuse money for morality. Free trade does reduce prices, but this is insignificant compared to the human misery it brings about. This debate is not about if free trade makes goods cheaper, it is about whether we can live with ourselves knowing the harm it causes. My answer to that has to be that we cannot.

I will now move onto the second part of my arguments, this time focussing on how free trade negatively affects the citizens of less economically developed countries (LEDCs). So much so that we should consider it doing more harm than good. My two arguments are that free trade simply allows the rich to exploit the foreign poor, through lacking regulation, and that free trade will be actively detrimental to the economy of many LEDCs.

Free trade is really a very simple idea: the country that can produce a good for the least cost should make it then sell it to other countries. This is the basis of all my opponent’s strengths. But I would like to examine what actually makes the cost of manufacture so much cheaper that it makes economic sense to trade. What are the costs of making a t-shirt, for example? There is the fabric, but that will be priced about equally everywhere. There is the factory rent and machinery upkeep, but these are probably not substantially different. The significant difference in price comes from the fact that the Bangladeshi worker has so many fewer rights than the British one and is given a significantly lower wage. Under free trade the manufacturing moves to the most relaxed regulations. This creates a race to the bottom, with every state now encouraged to slash regulations.

Regulations are not a bureaucratic game, they save lives. Let us never forget the 1000 garment workers killed when a factory collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013. This factory would never have met the high standards we demand in the West. If we had not made Bangladesh dependant on poor regulation for its economic survival, these people would still be alive. Let us also consider the extreme poverty of the world, would we accept that if it were at our door? No. We would demand higher wages for these workers. Free trade encourages low regulation. The cheaper prices on goods we do not need to consume at all may as well be death sentences.

Secondly, forcing the economies of LEDCs to open themselves to free trade totally will cripple them. Let us imagine a fairly standard agricultural community in an LEDC. Most farming is done in small farms, maybe run by a family or two. These small producers make food and then sell it to survive. What happens if we open these people up to free trade. In Ghana, this had a disastrous impact for the small rice farmers. They were flooded by cheap imported rice from India and the United States. Domestic farmers could just not keep up, seeing their incomes slashed. What made imported rice so cheap? It was massive subsidies given by the US government to Texas rice producers to make them efficient.

Who really wins in free trade? Answer: the rich countries able to subsidise their firms to buy the best equipment possible and produces artificially low prices. That is what my opponent means when he says, “free trade moves resources to where they’ll be the most efficient”, he means taking the incomes, livelihoods, and futures away from millions of the world’s poorest.

If we were forced to see the results of free trade on our own doorsteps, we would see it was doing more harm than good. That it is hidden does not mean the harm is any less.

Chasm

[citations in comments]

I will begin my third proposition with some responses to my opponent. While he is correct to say that the definition of trade does not affect labour laws that is irrelevant. As I have shown, the effects of free trade are to always encourage it. He speaks about free trading moving to the lowest costs, is labour regulation not the most significant cost that a government could reduce? I do not fully understand his cross-examination but presuming that he meant a country that had been harmed I have two responses. Firstly, I have already given numerous examples of countries that have been harmed. Ghana, Bangladesh, to name but a few. But we risk making the fallacy of division with this line of thought. A country as a whole can seem to benefit from trade, even if it harms their citizens more than it benefits them. If all minimum wage workers were forced to work 20 hours days it would boost GDP, but clearly do more harm than good. A ludicrous example, but one I hope shows my point. I will directly address his other arguments in the body of my argument. This speech shall be dedicated to the impacts of free trade on developed nations, with particular focus to my home United Kingdom.

My opponent is right to suggest that jobs can be lost in any type of economy, but jobs lost to free trade are different from other causes of unemployment in two ways: they are industry-wide and they are nationally determined. If before free trade a steel plan closed in Hull the workers might simply be picked up by another plant or move to Redcar to join a plant there. Workers with relevant skills and experience could be easily picked up in another part of the industry. Free trade is uniquely destructive because it decimates entire industries, moving everything oversees suddenly and unforgivingly. A laid-off British steel worker cannot simply move to China for his next job. Movement within nations is easy, movement across nations is prohibitively difficult.

My opponent lauded the benefits of this, declaring that it “allows markets to shift workers and resources to area where they’ll be more effective.” It is easy for us to take this detached, spreadsheet approach. To treat a human as nothing more than a productivity statistic, seeing it as a good thing if their lives are destroyed for a 5% reduction in long-term costs. Let’s look more into what happens when free trades cause industries to be destroyed. In the north of England entire towns revolved around their local coal mine or steel plant. Almost everybody worked in these plants, or in businesses supplying the workers, like shops or pubs. [1] Now, they are gone. Free trade meant that cheap Chinese steel and coal tore the industry to shreds, remember, this is the key benefit of free trade my opponent gave.

Entire communities have been decimated. They have been psychologically scarred by an unending legacy of unemployment and despair. [2] They could not move into an industry the UK exports, like financial services, because they had no education for that and anyway, it was all in London. These areas are now some of the most deprived in Europe. [3] All that could be offered are minimum wage jobs working supermarket checkouts, as large proportions of the population rely on benefits. In these conditions human misery knows no bounds. Young people are drawn into ever more violent drugs gangs.[4] Populism and the far-right grow. Do not think this is limited to the UK. My opponent points to the USA as a shining light of free-trade, does he understand that those millions who have had their livelihoods destroyed voted in Trump, perhaps, the most protectionist politician in the world? They can see clearly free trade does them more harm than good. I hope for the sake of every child beaten to death by drugs gangs, or every future turned to nothing but misery, just so my opponent can tout his slight productivity gains, that you see it too.

Chasm

With my final submission, I would like to provide an overview of the debate. Throughout the debate a theme has emerged, my opponent has said that lower prices are a benefit of free trade and that every harm I have brought up is either “not in the definition” or is irrelevant. This is seemingly from a denial of the laws of cause and effect, there is nothing in the definition of having a heart-attack that means you go to hospital, although clearly one causes the other. I have shown why my harms come about, if you want the benefits of cheaper prices you must stand by the harms I have shown in three stakeholder groups I will analyse now: workers making good to trade (1^st and 2^nd speech), business owners in developing economies (2^nd), and the poorest in developed countries (3^rd).

The first stakeholders are the ones directly harmed by the process of free trade my opponent outlined: that manufacturing takes place where it can happen at the lowest cost. As I showed, lowest cost actually means lowest wages and regulations, for these are most of a firm’s cost. Governments want their countries to be manufacturing powerhouses, but the only way to do this is to attract firms with even laxer regulations. Therefore, a direct result of trade is to encourage a race to the bottom of weak regulation. This will hurt workers the most, who are the ones being exploited here. We would not accept their condition for a British or American worker. They are therefore being harmed significantly. My opponent’s only response was that economic growth made people happier. His evidence: “Economic growth does not guarantee rising happiness.” I rest my case.

Secondly, I outlined how protectionist measures such as tariffs or quotas were important to protect businesses in LEDCs. I gave the example of local farmers going out of business because they could not compete with cheaper imported rice. These countries do not have the investment or wealth of developed countries to invest in the most efficient production systems, but by putting their farms out of work we trap them into never developing out of poverty. My opponent said jobs are lost all the time. This is true, but this is not a job loss as much as an industry decimation. No farm can compete with imported rice. He also said that Ghana’s GDP was high so they couldn’t be struggling. I have already shown this is not true, GDP can be high but a population harmed. A homeless American is in a country with the highest GDP in the world but is not one of the richest in the world.

Finally, my third speech showed how free trade can even have damaging effects on rich countries, giving the example of the UK. For the avoidance of doubt, Thatcher was the PM who imposed free trade on the UK, removing protections for steel and coal. My citations showed how reliant many areas of the UK were on coal, especially the north which is now one of the most deprived areas of Northern Europe. Now, these areas have no highly paid and respected mining jobs the only ones they have are minimum wage in supermarkets or takeaways. I showed how this leads to despair, and how hopelessness leads to crime. This area had the highest spike in UK violent crime in the last couple of years. My opponent says that they should find other mining jobs. They cannot, China undercuts the UK because it has lower regulations. More Chinese miners die slowly of black lung, but at least it’s cheap! UK steelworkers have fallen from 320,000 in 1971 to 24,000, they are not getting jobs back. My opponent gave the example of malls, a market that cannot be affected by trade as it cannot be exported. Look at UK steel and coal, look at the destruction of free trade.

The world is turning on free trade. The US, his example of free trade, elected the most protectionist president ever. We would happily pay a bit more for a TV if it ended the suffering of the millions in the groups I have outlined. Harm > Benefit