Re: Re: neomercantilism, trade

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Perelman" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2001 7:37 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:16423] Re: neomercantilism, trade


> Keynes realized, certainly by the early 1940s, that propping an
economy up
> would be far more difficult to the extent that the economy is open.
> Certainly by the mid-1920s, because of his involvement with the
Manchester
> textile industry, Keynes was more than familiar with the declining
> industry.  I doubt that he thought of himself as a protectionist.

=============
I recall that at the Davos meeting after Seattle, Maddy Halfbright was
running around denying the US was an empire and Larry "I love
Aspartame" Summers was saying it marked the end of neo-mercantilism.
Given the problem of property rights as protection and the recent
questioning in international relations circles at to whether the
nation state should be the fundamental unit of analysis, I'm wondering
how long before whole free trade-protectionist binary will be no
longer operative.

If a tariff is a tax then what were really seeing is a global shifting
of the tax burden away from capitalists, but states have yet to seek
compensatory increases in taxes on wages or other income. Perhaps they
feel that lowered expectations on the part of the working class for
public goods like social insurance and the like, in conjunction with
increasing returns to scale via global production networks will
mitigate the need for more taxes? It is tax exemption for corporations
that is being implemented by the WTO along with risk *displacement*. A
massive interference in the market in order to stabilize a few score
oligopolies.

Ian