Not a Zero-Sum Game - Ludwig von Mises Institute

NOT A ZERO-SUM GAME
injurious U.S. tariff on wool should prove how devoted NAFTA's
supporters are to free trade.
Free trade does not depend on international bureaucracies, yet
NAFTA creates several of them. Its Commission for Environmen-
tal Cooperation was set up to enforce the environmental aim of
sustainable growth. One tactic it uses is to prevent countries from
trying to create a friendlier environment for investors by relaxing
any extant environmental regulations.7 Such rules are to be enforced
by trade sanctions and fines, with the latter to go into a slush fund
for environmental law enforcement.8 NAFTA also created a Labor
Commission, whose purpose is to level the playing field between
trading partners with regard to labor costs. To repeat, free trade
this is not.
WTO
The crowning jewel of managed trade is the World Trade Organi-
zation. Instituted to replace GATT, its 29,000-page treaty is a
bureaucrat's dream come true. Its driving force comes from those
who see government's job as civilizing the market (which they
believe would otherwise operate as the law of the jungle). While
those 29,000 pages say little about deregulating trade, they say a
great deal about regulating everything else. Whereas GATT had
been a voluntary forum for nations seeking mutual agreements to
lower tariffs, the WTO has enforcement powers, with trade sanc-
tions chief among them.
7. For example, article 11 14 forbids relaxing environmental regulations as an encouragement
for establishment, acquisition, expansion or retention in its territory of an investment or
investor. Sheehan, ibid.
8. Matthew C. Hoffman and James M. Sheehan, The Fvee Tmde Case against NAFTA
(Washington, D.C.: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1993), p. 3.