Jimmy Akin

Earlier I mentioned the Vatican position paper saying that developed nations should reconsider their farm subsidies and agricultural trade barriers so that those in the developing world won’t be hurt by them.

Unfortunately, protectionism is a perpetual risk for every nation, including those in the developed world.

After all: What politician doesn’t want to be able to please certain segments of his constitutency by offering it subsidies and protectionistic trade barriers to keep the prices it can charge for what it makes high?

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting analysis of how the U.S. has been able to ward off the kind of protectionism that has hurt Europe’s economies, as well as a warning about what may be on our horizon.

He writes:

The beauty of the American free-trade consensus over the last few decades is that it split two outlooks that tend to go together: nationalism and socialism. In terms of economic policy, nationalism is indistinguishable from socialism. When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. And what is the difference between socialized medicine and nationalized healthcare?

Liberals are naturally sympathetic to socialistic arguments, conservatives to nationalistic ones. But to everyone’s benefit these two outlooks have been quarantined in different parties. Conservatives have been culturally nationalistic but economically liberal (in the classical sense). Liberals have been economically nationalistic — on healthcare, regulation, taxes, unions — but culturally liberal. Although it’s been quite painful for them, this cultural liberalism has kept the Democratic Party in favor of free trade and immigration. Protectionism hurts foreigners and poor Americans, after all.

Indeed, to be fair, the Democratic Party has been heroic in bucking its base — the economically nationalistic labor movement — on free trade. FDR, Truman and Kennedy were all consummate economic nationalists. Free trade was tactically in their interests for a long time because it dovetailed with labor’s interest. When the United States stopped being the manufacturer to the world, the Democratic Party struggled — not always successfully — to stay pro-trade on principle, even at the cost of votes. Meanwhile, the GOP has had the opposite challenge: to stay pro-free trade even as its ranks swell with working-class voters enamored with their paychecks, not Adam Smith.

Now, a win-at-all-costs Democratic Party has realized that this is the perfect moment for it to re-brand all of its economic ideas in the language of patriotism. Many Republicans are determined to fight the Democrats for this turf. So they too are bending their economic policies to fit their cultural conservatism.

And if we let them follow this path, we’ll have the same problems as Europe in no time.

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One doesn’t normally get the impression that many high churchmen are committed exponents of the free market.

Even when the free market is circumscribed by laws safeguarding fundamental moral values (like: You can’t buy and sell intrinsically immoral goods and services), and while John Paul II acknowledged that the market is able to do better for man than Communism, the impression is still given that many churchmen are somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the free market.

But there seems to be an evolution of thought occurring on this subject. As the economies of the world have developed, it has become more and more clear what works and what doesn’t, and the reputation of the free market seems to be improving in at least some ecclesiastical circles.

One recent sign of at least part of this is a March 9th position paper issued by the Holy See for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s conference on agrarian reform and rural developement.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate a copy of the document, but from what can be gleaned of its contents from the news, it appears that at least some folks at the Vatican appreciate the fact that protectionistic farm subsidies and trade barriers in the developed world hurt farmers in the developing world.

Thus, according to the Catholic News Service (EXERPTS):

Justice requires that wealthy nations reconsider the level of subsidies they offer their own farmers and the barriers that countries place on the import of agricultural products from developing nations, the Vatican said.

While developing countries have to take responsibility for their own agrarian policies, the Vatican said, rich countries cannot ignore the impact their internal policies, particularly farm subsidies and trade barriers, have on the poor.

"Correcting this situation means appealing for a concrete concept of justice capable of being realized in policies, rules, norms and acts of solidarity," the Vatican said.

What you’ve just heard is the sound of one shoe dropping.

The other shoe–if it is to drop–is the recognition that what’s good for the third world in this respect is good for the first.

The fact developed countries are as economically developed as they are is no accident: It’s because they developed a legal and cultural environment in which economic development could take place, and that has been helped along by refusal to engage in economic protectionism and thus have free markets.

True, Europe is presently in the grip of a wave of protectionism that has hampered its economy, and even here in America there are protectionist elements (like all the farm subsidies the government gives out), but an important part of our economic development is that our markets are free-er than they could be.

It’ll be interesting to see how thought on these matters evolves in ecclesiastical circles in the future.

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