An Egalitarian Take on Tariffs and Free Trade
We're offered today a phony debate. We need a genuine egalitarian conversation about these questions.
As anybody knows who has shopped lately in a U.S. hardware store or clothing store (online or brick and mortar) or shoe store or even the produce section of a grocery store or virtually any store selling something that is not strictly digital (like an insurance policy, for example) knows, most of the stuff for sale there was made in another country and a LOT was made in China.
The standard (mass media, punditry) wisdom is that this de-industrialization of the United States is a bad thing for Americans. What I say is that it is not a bad thing per se; what makes it a bad thing is the anti-egalitarian context in which it takes place. In an egalitarian world there might be nothing particularly bad about it. And in an egalitarian world the very idea of tariffs would be non-sensical.
Here’s what I mean.
In our anti-egalitarian world, meaning our world of class inequality with some rich and some poor, with the rich treating the have-nots like dirt in order to maintain their unjust wealth and power and privilege, the context in which economic production takes place is one that makes it an instrument of the very rich for dominating the have-nots. Regardless of whether American jobs are in manufacturing and mining or some kind of office work, in agriculture and construction or in retail and marketing, for most people a job is a form of slavery to a CEO who treats them like a slave. Yes, employees unlike slaves get paid and can quit, but egalitarians know that life for people can and MUST be better than what it is today for workers. Not to mention that more and more workers are actually NOT paid because they are among the growing ranks of unpaid interns with a freshly minted college diploma that no longer gets them a paid job.
Corporations that employ more than a handful of people are set up for the purpose of making the rich people who own them (the share-owners) richer, at the expense of have-nots in general and in particular at the expense of the have-not employees who have no say in the operation of the enterprise and must obey orders from the CEO who is responsible to the board of directors that represents the richest owners of the corporation.
A corporation is an overt dictatorship of the rich. Employees who do not obey orders are fired. One does not need to be a Marxist to understand that the employees, despite being the people who create the wealth that the corporation sells for its profit, have no claim to ownership of that wealth and receive wages/benefits and work in conditions that are as low and bad as the corporation can get away with, which depends on how well the employees manage to fight the corporate dictatorship for higher wages and better benefits and working conditions by going on strike or threatening to do so.
This is the anti-egalitarian context in which world trade takes place today. Corporate CEOs and Boards of Directors are required by law (the Fiduciary Law that says CEOs and boards of directors must act in the financial interests of the share-holders) to do things such as:
moving production to where labor is cheaper even if this means firing thousands of workers at home, and
threatening to move production to where labor is cheaper to force the employees to accept cuts in pay and benefits, and
doing things designed to destroy solidarity of the employees, such as creating a two-tier pay scale so people doing exactly the same work get paid differently, treating people differently according to their race and sex, and so on, and
spending as little as possible to make the work environment safe not to mention (gasp!) comfortable nor (double gasp!!) enjoyable, and
producing whatever can be (legally in most cases but for drug cartels it’s not a concern) sold for maximum profit no matter how unsafe or socially harmful or wasteful of our limited social wealth (so we get Pringles potato chips and planned obsolescence and food items that aren’t healthy and toys that get played with for a day or two and then discarded), and
buying advertisements on TV designed to make us want what we never wanted (“Ask your doctor about …”) and think something is wrong with us (“Ring around the collar” “body ordor,” etc.) that we never had thought about before and believe that if we only owned a fancier car (or whatever) that people would then respect us, and
add your own stuff to this list, please!
This is the current context in which global trade takes place.
The Phony Debate about Tariffs
The mass media and punditry tell us to accept the current context for global trade as an uncontroversial fact of life, like the law of gravity, something that one obviously does not question or even need to talk about, something that one takes as a given starting point for discussing what to do or what to expect.
So, we are told that the big question today is whether having high tariffs in the United States is a good idea or a bad idea for ordinary Americans.
We’re told, on the one hand, that high tariffs will mean higher prices for the stuff we buy (we’re never told this could be compensated for if the government gave back to us the tariff/tax revenue, as I discuss here, but never mind.) And maybe high tariffs will lead to another Great Depression. Or maybe not.
On the other hand, we’re told that high tariffs will make it easier for American manufacturers to compete with foreign ones and this will result in more U.S. manufacturing jobs and therefore high tariffs are good for ordinary Americans. (We’re not supposed to ever think about how a ‘job’ is a form of on-the-job slavery, what some people call ‘wage slavery’ and what led the Industrial Workers of the World gloriously to call for the “abolition of the wage system.”)
How about we have a REAL debate about whether we want an egalitarian society or an anti-egalitarian one?
It already is the case that MOST people, despite the mass media denying the fact, would LOVE to live in an egalitarian society, as I prove here.
In an egalitarian world people who work in an enterprise would all have an equal say in democratically running the enterprise. They would not be just the ‘hired hands’ who must obey the top guy or be fired. They and the other egalitarians in the local community would have the real say in what they produce and how they produce it or what service they provide and how they provide it. Things would not be bought and sold, they would be shared with other producers with mutual agreements on the basis of “from each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” Since things are not bought and sold, tariffs would be non-sensical.
In an egalitarian world people would not be competing against each other, fearful that advances of people elsewhere in technology and production was an economic threat against which tariffs are required for protection. On the contrary! As I have written earlier, …
Egalitarians don’t view other people as competitors; they view them as friends, as people with whom to create relations of mutual aid, as people with whom to share the economic fruits of their labor (read about an egalitarian economy here) for mutual benefit. Egalitarians would share technological and scientific knowledge in order to increase everybody’s ability to maximally benefit people everywhere. Why not? Egalitarians would be happy if people elsewhere discovered or invented a way to do something faster or cheaper or create something new and wonderful. Why not?
If egalitarians were for some reason much more economically productive somewhere compared to elsewhere, they would practice mutual aid with the less productive egalitarians. They would share according to the principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” Virtually everybody today understands exactly what this means because this is how adults share goods and services with children, right?
Adults don’t share goods and services with children according to the principle of “equal value in exchange for equal value” (which is what money and barter are ALL about). Thus adults don’t say to children, “If you want a meal to eat you’ll have to give me something of equal value for it.” No! Adults say, “Today I provide you with meals to eat and ask only that you do whatever you are reasonably able to do to help out in return. And I also teach you how to become a proficient adult one day yourself, when you will accomplish perhaps more than I ever could and make my life and the lives of others better by doing so. And when I see you doing something amazingly creative that I never thought of, I say that is WONDERFUL.”
Likewise, more economically productive egalitarians and less economically productive egalitarians would not view each other as enemies or competitors (as Tulsi Gabbard tells us we must view the Chinese as our enemy because of their advances in technology, etc.) but would be in a mutually beneficial relationship like the mutually beneficial relationship between adults and children.
This is how the vast majority of people think it ought to be! This is how the vast majority of people will make it be when they seize power.
In an egalitarian world, there is sovereignty of local assemblies of egalitarians. There are no national law-making governments. There is voluntary federation of the local assemblies of egalitarians to carry out mutually agreed upon endeavors, on as large a scale as people wish, even globally if people desire. If egalitarians wish to exchange goods and services on a large—even global-scale, they can do so. If egalitarians wish to specialize in various geographical regions what kinds of goods and services they produce, they may do so. Egalitarians are not obliged to arrange things so that they rely exclusively on locally produced goods and services. They may decide there is a more sensible way to go about producing and sharing such things.
The point is that, in contrast to our anti-egalitarian world that is a dictatorship of the rich in which the only choices we’re allowed to debate are ones that are bad for us and good for the rich, in an egalitarian world egalitarians will debate and choose among choices that they believe are good for the vast majority of people—their fellow egalitarians. And the anti-egalitarians will be told, “You’re no longer in charge.”
Thanks John. As you say, the tariffs issue is part of the larger debate about the manner in which people are controlled through an anti-egalitarian structure via corporations. Love that cartoon. So true.