The Debate over Free Trade
Stephen Bell
[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April
1940]
Secretary Hull's program of reciprocal trade treaties is by far the
best thing the present national Administration has brought forth,
although it is such a puny and inadequate proposal that it does not
arouse great enthusiasm in me. Its chief value lies in the opportunity
it affords for real free traders to get a nation-wide audience before
which they can present the merits of full commercial freedom, and for
this I am devoutly thankful.
The Con of Free Trade, by Peter D. Haley, seems to me a case of the
trees obscuring the forest. Does Mr. Haley regard production as one
thing and trade as another thing, instead of being merely "mentally
separable parts of the same thing", the industry by which mankind
gets its living from the earth? Restraint of one inevitably means
restraint of the other. The freedom of both, from the artificial
restraints which have been imposed upon them, is necessary in order to
achieve complete economic freedom, and Mr. Haley errs in thinking that
the freeing of trade in itself is valueless. Protection is an
important rampart protecting land monopolization, and it must be
removed before economic freedom can be attained.
In his day Henry George properly stressed the rise in the rental
value of land, which was absorbing the benefits of material progress.
Taxation in this country was then comparatively small only in its
infancy and capitalization of the unearned increment grew rapidly. In
1879, when "Progress and Poverty" was first published, the
entire revenue of the Federal government was a scant $318,000,000, and
state and local taxation was also relatively small. Today the naval
bill before Congress calls for more than three times that sum, while
the mere interest on the national debt of about forty-five billion
dollars calls for more than a billion dollars, even though present
interest rates are unprecedentedly low.
Mr. Haley must know that it has been estimated by competent
investigators that taxes are absorbing 25 per cent or more of the
nation's earnings, that taxes on the products and processes of
industry and trade constitute 25 to 30 per cent of the cost and price
of the things comprising our standard of living. He should know that
tariff taxes rank high among the taxes which enhance the cost and
price of goods. Surely he knows that the whole vicious system of
misplaced and larcenous taxes must be swept away, and the burden of
the public revenue placed where it rightfully belongs on the socially
created rental value of the land. Certainly, he ought to know that,
however desirable it may be to get rid of the whole thievish tax
system all at once, we cannot do it that way. We must attack it
wherever we can, and if the opportunity presents itself to attack the
tariff, we should not let it go by.
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