Those defending markets should not fall into NAFTA fever, into a dogmatic orthodoxy whereby they defend NAFTA and the illusion of a free market victory. These were never free market victories, but intervention dressed in the garb of market rhetoric. We should not be jumping to the defense of the results of interventionism. Interventionism causes a death spiral of failure and continually worse social conditions.
How can you call documents that are thousands of pages, with requirements for environment, inclusion, wages and whom you are NOT ALLOWED TO TRADE WITH free market?
https://mises.org/mises-wire/nafta-fever-and-myth-government-created-free-markets
Left or right, the enemy is the free market. Every problem is the fault of the free market. On the left, the supposed radical deregulation of the 1980s paved the way for the financial crisis and the destruction of the environment. On the right, free trade is responsible for the gutting of manufacturing. The free market is made out in this mythos to have had its heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s and destroyed everything. Even free market advocates fall into this trap, saying that this time in the near past was a free market victory. The results—they try to argue with the market critics, but they agree with the causal analysis: Markets won! Hooray!
The fact is that all three of these groups are wrong. There was no American market revolution in the ‘80s.
It is important to make note of the rhetoric of American life up until the 1980s. American life at the beginning of the 1930s was introduced to the message of “market failures” that justified the New Deal. By the end of the 1940s, Americans were thrown into the Cold War, where all of American life was defined by a battle between “American Capitalism” and “Soviet Communism.”
Paying lip service to the free market was easy. Fusionism became the default conservative ideology, the mixture of so-called “fiscal conservatism,” the “moral majority,” and hawkish foreign policy. The hawkish foreign policy—the boogeyman of National Review—was bearing the brunt of the load. As Buckley put it:
We have got to accept Big Government for the duration [of the Cold War]— for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged…except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.
“Fiscal conservatism” was cast aside in the name of fighting the Soviet menace, but it was in the name of capitalism because everything was done in the name of fighting communism. Every American who bought into the existential crisis of Cold War rhetoric could be coaxed into supporting any policy in the name of capitalism and free trade. So when politicians wheeled forward thousand-page treaties with import/export quotas, environmental regulations, and currency price controls under the name of “Free Trade Agreements.” No wonder the American people got behind it.
No wonder free trade got stuck with the blame. It is an age-old tactic to give bills positive names while they have the opposite effect (e.g., the Inflation Reduction Act). Who would oppose the “Giving Puppies Good Homes Bill of 2024”? At the end of the Cold War, who would oppose a supposed free trade agreement with our fellow capitalist allies?
With the backing of the tail-end of the Cold War market-rhetoric and every Cold War “free enterprise” think tank, we were given NAFTA. Rothbard himself lamented the rise of NAFTA fervor in every so-called “free market think tank.” He wrote in his essay “The NAFTA Myth”:
For some people, it seems, all you have to do to convince them of the free enterprise nature of something is to label it “market,” and so we have the spawning of such grotesque creatures as “market socialists” or “market liberals.” The word “freedom,” of course, is also a grabber, and so another way to gain adherents in an age that exalts rhetoric over substance is simply to call yourself or your proposal “free market” or “free trade.” Labels are often enough to nab the suckers.
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