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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The notion of a global free market performs both of these paradigmatical functions. On the one hand, it invokes a whole host of mutually supporting ideas and values shared - tacitly at least - by many economists, world leaders, economic think tanks, owners and managers of international business organizations, as well as by libertarian or conservative members of the academic community. All at once, the paradigm is about incentives and rewards; about dismantling trade barriers and responding to the challenge of competitive advantage; about voluntary trades and individual autonomy; about efficiency; about freedom; and about enhancing the prospects for all, wherever they may live, whatever may be their fiscal and political circumstances, and notwithstanding their gender, education, health, or economic resources.

On the other hand, the free market performs what Kuhn calls an exemplary role when placed in the larger context generated by questions concerning exploitation and economic justice. As a result, the free market paradigm is ineluctably self-justifying and insular: it will not address those considerable matters which it locates outside of its sphere. Hence, the poignancy of the "puzzles" to which this paradigm can be connected (such as the "constellation" containing, for example, inequality of bargaining, and the economic cleavage between the developed and undeveloped worlds) dissolves in the paradigmatic mist.

Kuhn does not emphasize the deceptive, submerging role which paradigms could play in the promotion of a given construct but his theory clearly accommodates this outcome. For instance, by expressing his assumption that the researcher would be wise enough one day to "undertake a problem . . . that goes wrong in ways suggestive of a fundamental weakness in the paradigm itself," (Kuhn, 1977, 235) he casts the researcher as, in the words of David Warsh, "someone looking for trouble . . . but . . . [who] doesn't want to find it too often" (1988, 250). This description implies that a paradigm survives, in part at least, because its own systemic self-validation goes unchallenged or undetected by its promoters.

Nonetheless, the solution to the extreme disparity in global market opportunity resulting from national destitution is not an indiscriminate increase in foreign aid. International agencies have not proven effective in fostering development and have spent vast sums only to produce negligible, even negative results (Human Development Report, 1992, 74 and following). Project mismanagement, political instability, bureaucratic corruption within a given regime, and war(1) make development difficult and at times, impossible to achieve. J. R. Lucas (1980, 256), for example, is correct to note that policies pursued by governments in certain lesser developed countries do seem to be at variance with the interests of the citizens. Further, simply sending tied or untied aid to an impoverished country does not guarantee that it will actually reach the people in need.(2) See too Genovese (1994) and Lucas (1988). As J. R. Lucas notes, justice "does not require rich nations to provide poor nations with the wherewithal to buy arms or to subsidise national airlines that only a small minority of their peoples could ever afford to use" (1980, 256).