Economic justice and global trade: an analysis of the libertarian foundations of the free trade paradigm

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 1996  by Shannon Kathleen O'Byrne

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But let us assume that even the most radical free market proponent would not argue that the undeveloped world needs the "spur" of its own poverty to facilitate the eventual attainment of economic prosperity. Even this concession would not, ironically, imply the obligation for wealth redistribution. The libertarian who conceded that arguments based on incentives have little meaning in the context of extreme poverty would revert to some other more "relevant" argument against economic, redistribution identified above. Redistribution would be seen as a forceable taking or as wrongly attributing blame, or as interfering with liberty, or as compromising the neutrality of the market. It would thereby be dismissed on other grounds.

V

Conclusion

In concluding this review of the five major assertions that seek to validate libertarianism, it is important to note how the consequences of a libertarian analysis are patently predetermined: the status quo concerning massively disproportionate distribution of wealth is maintained - not in the name of expediency - but in the name of an overarching human value which mandates this outcome (McClelland, 69).

As a result, the libertarian global free market paradigm validates a strategy of reductionism, postponement, unsubstantiated meliorism, and utter apathy, in acknowledging the condition of people who cannot subsist, let alone prosper in a global free market. At worst, any interference with free market forces is interpreted as an attack on the paramount value of freedom because it restricts the ability to trade, and in the instance of wealth redistribution, requires an individual, corporation, or nation state to surrender private property to another. At best, interfering with the free market in the name of a normative notion of fairness or equity is insensible because there can be no agreement as to what these values are, why property should be redistributed, when it is appropriate to do so and to what extent. In this way, the normative requirements of absolute freedom, total certainty and complete consensus become a revolving set of trump cards against the claims and the needs of the world's poor.

VI

Towards a Broader Economic Vision

The norm of a laissez-faire global marketplace has such a powerful currency in international trading relations that it is nothing less than a paradigm. According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a paradigm is both sociological and exemplary. Sociologically, it "stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by members of a given community" (1970, 175). As exemplar of past achievements within a discipline (175):

it denotes one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science.

Put another way, "The student discovers . . . a way to see his problem as like a problem he has already encountered" (189).