Free Trade Is Superior to Protectionism

Sorry if I inadvertently broke the debate format. I thought round two was for presenting arguments and not to refute. Also while the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation may rely on like minded peer reviews to vet their opinion pieces, Wikipedia entries features a broad range of citations from numerous scholastic sources, so I think it is fair to say Wikipedia is a far more reliable source of empirical information. At least half of my information can be found directly in the CIA factbook.And I would be interested to know your opinion on patents and intellectual property particularly in a global scope.One of the main questions I asked when accepting this debate that has gone unanswered is if you would further define your “criteria of superior as both quality and merit are highly subjective.” I tried to address this my thesis by arguing that policy which facilitates globalization (free trade) in it’s current form has been the leading perpetuator of famine, environmental erosion, poverty, and human rights violations globally. Please refute or at least address this point. Clearly it implies that free trade is inferior to protectionism, but it seems that the basic rights of humans to live in a sanitary environment, earn a living wage that affords them the baseline food, clothes, and shelter, pale in comparison to the ideological righteousness of free trade fundamentalists.Though I agree that subsidies, loans, tariffs, and taxes are all distortions of the free market, I think there is a natural discrepancy between your ideological beliefs and your beliefs in relation to reality.For instance, you say that the IMF and World Bank are not institutions that promote free trade, yet the policies they enforce are largely the ones you advocate for. Their structural adjustment programs remove price controls and subsidies, liberalize trade, balance the national budget, encourage foreign investment, and privatize state owned enterprises. Also, the existence of a purely free-market economy is about as rare as a barter economy or anarchist society; they largely exist in the minds of anthropologists and economists. Striving towards an unattainable goal is not wrong, it’s what keeps people working towards a [more] perfect society, but working towards a free-market economy is just plain arbitrary. Why not strive towards a society in which famine, environmental erosion, poverty, and human rights violations are virtually non-existent? Of course in the vacuum of a world that austrian fundamentalists live in, that would mean we here in the developed world would see our standard of living markedly decrease. Fortunately, this is not the case. The world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, the problem is that a billion people are too poor to afford it or don’t have the land to grow it. This is just one example of an artificial problem globalization has created. The problem today is not so much that tariffs on goods are too low but that liquidity of capital is too high. This encouraging corporations to offshore jobs and production to countries where the wellbeing of the working population is not taken into consideration. But once they’re there, these businesses can all too easily close down production and move to another country with even lower standards leaving behind rusty machinery, derelict buildings, and an untrained workforce. This sort of cold, efficient allocation of resources that Austrians advocate for is in essence a race to the bottom in which the pay of executives skyrockets while the condition of the less fortunate only deteriorates. Some of your historical points like “Free trade forced British industries to compete with the world” and that is what cause Britain to “experience its industrial revolution sooner than countries like the U.S.” are just completely unfounded. The idea that Britain, the predominant colonial power at the time, had to compete on international markets with any other nation is just laughable. Essentially, Britain and the other colonial powers had near complete control over the global market. Also how could you confuse Britain’s state chartered trading companies with free enterprises? The primary reason America experienced it’s industrial revolution later than Britain is that again, Britain kept very tight control over their machine patents and engineers by cracking down on counterfeit goods and defectors.I understand that because many of the examples I cited in my argument affect mainly people in other parts of the globe it is hard to empathize with their situation, but again it's fairly hard to argue that when the difference between global famine and global prosperity comes down to marginal corporate profits why we shouldn't regulate trade.