At 54 words, this was the original North American Free Trade Agreement. As we shall see, the 1994 agreement that goes by that name makes a travesty of free trade. The damage done by restrictions on international trade became clear to most people during the debacle of the 1930s. Once World War II had ended, the popularity of free trade surpassed Macaulay's fondest hopes. Yet in many ways truly free trade was not in keeping with the tenor of the postwar times.
Free trade requires neither complex laws nor ponderous bureaucracies.
With the establishment of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, the world was moving in the opposite direction. So postwar governments sought managed trade rather than free trade. While the establishment of the proposed International Trade Organization was avoided, free trade was not restored. For a while even, the international bureaucracies that managed trade seemed to move the world in the right direction, generally lowering tariff rates. Managed traders seemed to resemble free traders.