December 28, 2025
Free Market Sophistry
Timothy Birdnow
If history has taught us anything it is that when you stop making stuff for yourself and start buying it from people far away, especially those who bear you no good will, you are in trouble.
The Bronze Age was a period much like today with very free and easy trade among the empires in and around the Mediterranean and it ended when the supply chains were broken by the Sea People and other invading barbarians forces; nobody could make what they needed for themselves and the whole ponzi scheme fell apart as everyone just had part of what they needed. Had they sought a modicum of self-sufficiency things could have turned out differently.
Much abuse is heaped on the merchantilist era, but what was that but an over-reliance on international trade in the first place? Most European countries built giant colonial empires at enormous expense so they had access to resources they needed, but it hollowed out many local markets which would have found ways to cope otherwise. In the end the empire builders became slaves to the very empires they created and to the goods and services coming from Third World colonies. It is that same colonialism that has led to multiculturalism and the immigration crisis in the West that is swallowing up our civilization.
Why did America flourish during the merchantilist times? Because the average person couldn't compete with colonial workers in terms of wages and so it was either immigrate or perish. This didn't change with the end of colonialism and the coming of capitalism (not to be confused with free market economics) and if anything it got worse. Look at the flood of peoples into the U.S. in the beginning of the 20th century, for instance. I would add G.K. Chesterton, as conservative a commentator as can be found, once said the difference between a capitalist and a socialist was a bigger paycheck. He was right, although today we call that not capitalism (which has been confused with free markets) but corporatism. Corporatism was the economic model followed by the Third Reich and Mussolini, the partnership between giant corporations and government. We also call it National Socialism.
All of this bad stuff - even Marxism, which was an overreaction to the rising tide of international exploitive trade - grew out of the dissatisfaction with the very order which Mr Lowry seems to be defending. Internationalism is always justified by the economic Anschluss of international trade run amok.
That' not to say such trade is always bad, and certainly we need things we don't possess and must trade for it and make things we want to sell to our partners, but there have to be common sense limits. We haven't had that for a long time now. The illegal alien invasions of the entire Western world comes from our lust for cheaper labor than we ourselves can get and out of the desire to internationalize the whole world. It is the inevitable conclusion to the merchantilist vision, albeit instead of military empires we have created economic empires ultimately controlled by our enemies. It's a fast path to our destruction as surely as was the overspecialization and free trade in the Bronze Age.
And so to Rich Lowry, here are some we think countervailing points:
We admit to coming from a nationalistic mindset, call it tribal if you want. We are for more fare or reciprocal tariffs in order to help keep extensive productive capacity in operation in our country and not in theory (as Lowry perhaps suggests is good enough) on the presumption that the variety of components necessary, skilled soft resources, raw materials and infrastructure are or would be readily at hand, just flip a switch or something.
When we had more doctrinaire free trade sympathies we did not realize the dark downsides and implications it creates — one world government — "world trade federations’ world health organizations, G summit this and G summit that, none of them to be trusted as they are hallmarks of heavily managed society inuring to one-world government and bureaucratized to the extent one must get permission to do something from Belgium rather than say Bismarck where people are governed by a freedom protecting Constitution.
Raw statistics particularly measured in dollars as we are finding out can hide a lot –how valuable are those dollars when the country that supposedly stands behind them in some way is so much in debt — many many many trillions at a minimum. That we just keep printing more and more money may not be a good reflection of economic activity even adjusted for inflation. If the medium of exchange we promote is not accepted how much is our wealth? And differing with Lowry, when as they say the SHTF, country X might be in need of something more edible than our software. And indeed our society and our families, our culture must be well protected, and in house as to primary needs because without them in the short term many could be dead.
For me the nationalistic sentiments (which have many fathers) referred to as MAGA and its trade policies are about vulnerability in a world that is still volatile. They are about not being a patsy – financing other countries socialism even if it is a downfall for them — because entertaining their lifestyle is long-term pathogenic for both of us. It is about not enhancing or being dependent on other nations for production while our capabilities not merely deteriorate but become lost.
One country doing and selling what they do best and buying from another country what they do best is the mantra of globalism which human nature being what it is is a stalking horse for one-world government to monitor and police the agreements. Of course cheater countries abound because they take the logical progression seriously and are not about to abide by it for their own countries’ broader based industrial survival.
Rich you refer to "more tech and aerospace, less shoes and textiles” as key to our supposed economic health. But the tech (including aerospace) can be and is copied. Our aerospace is to a great extent military oriented and that is also used to protect freeloaders’ lifestyles.
By your lights why should we produce any shoes or textiles? We can "simply” go to India for them right? All manner of countries with their own specialty thinking it can hold the others hostage, no problem. Mutual assured destruction?
More than tech being copied tech can contain vulnerabilities which can be catastrophic. Also, tech depends on our staying a step ahead of our competitors, something we find unprofitable to do as it requires a proper education and work ethic among our own citizenry and it's cheaper to import foreigners to do this research for us. It's a self-destroying machine.
I would argue we have been creating a world that is interdependent to create a world government using the European Union model. It started after the war as an oil and coal entente' between Germany and France, a conscious plot by the French to tie Germany's economy into their to the point they dared never attack the French state again. Soon other nations joined and it became the Common Market, then metastasized into an overlord governing body called the European Union. I believe that has been the goal of "free trade" for some time, to make the world so interdependent that we will accept an international government.
And Climate alarmism is a tool to that end, too; it promotes the idea of "one world" and seeks to restrict the First World so the Third World will be able to compete and eventually catch up. It is a giant scheme to transfer wealth to make us all equal. That can never work; there are good reasons why these countries never developed beyond Third World status to begin with. So they will always require subsidies, and that means we in the wealthy nations must be willing to sacrifice our freedoms and lifestyles to that end.
So capitalism is being used to destroy private ownership and free markets and people like Mr. Lowry fail to see that.
Even if this was not a conscious decision (and it was because it always supports the same outcome) it is where this "free trade" scheme is leading us.
And it was technology that led to the rising standard of living, tech and mechanization. Oil and electronics are what made the last half century so prosperous, not the free trade which probably held everyone back.
Held us back indeed; during the Pandemic we saw a dropoff of industrial output in the West and a turn for the worse in the Third World. We saw breaks in our supply chains, inflation, and stagnant economic growth. This illustrates the vulnerability of the supply chains we rely on these days. And what was the response? To increase government regulations, to print and spend a lot more money, in other words to double down on the thing that was hurting us in the first place.
I am mindful of the mid 2000nds television show Jerico. After a nuclear sneak attack on America the survivors of a small Kansas town struggle to survive. In one of the later episodes a young girl takes up with an idiot guy just to bug her older brother/guardian. The new boyfriend argues that the first order of business needed to be to get the internet back up "then we can buy stuff", when asked how we will actually make and deliver stuff he argues "we'll just order it online". To me so much of the free trade argument is basically that sophistic. There seems to be a magical thinking involved and an inability to understand that if a disaster should befall the world (like an asteroid strike or another Carrington event) these supply lines will be permanently broken and we won't have the tools we need to make anything for ourselves. Society will crumble when it could perhaps survive if more decentralized. But that isn't what they want; they want everyone specialized and thus performing one specific (or a few) task that will be the sole provider for the entire planet. That way lies total destruction in an emergency.
I wish people like Rich Lawry would understand that we are not practicing free trade. Free trade must go both ways.
Even Adam Smith advocated tariffs to level unfair playing fields. Sadly the good people at National Review believe themselves smarter than the father of free markets.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
01:28 PM
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