The Crime Families Meet in Korea

by David D'Amato
Nov. 12, 2010

The G20 summit, that semi-annual jamboree celebrating state power and global corporatism, is set to get underway this week amidst the United States' pointed reprimands of China's monetary policy. The United States, speaking for the domestic Big Business interests it represents, maintains that China is undervaluing its currency in order to bolster its exports, while China has riposted that the U.S. should "face [its] own problems."

The exchange of barbs between the two global superpowers has prompted worries regarding another kind of exchange, that of goods, raising the prospect of a protectionist trade war. Underscoring the irony of the U.S. lecturing China on tinkering with its currency, Germany and other countries have been quick to castigate the U.S. for its inflationary excesses of the printing press, calling on the U.S. to practice what it preaches. With their system of thievery on the brink, the most powerful states in the world have sent their distinguished meddlers and miscreants to Seoul to collude with their foreign counterparts.

The gathering represents an incredible act of presumption in, as Bill Haynes noted last year, "the notion that the very people who created the problems can solve them through more government actions." But then, the states come to the table not so much to solve global economic problems, i.e., to deliver an economic configuration that would be sustainable on the whole, but to modify their policies just enough to enable their shared custom of exploitation to persevere.

Every government on earth is conscious that consistent protectionism, carried to its logical end, would mean economic debilitation and suicide, but the whole state-corporate paradigm depends on its structured application. The state's reticulate structure of regulations and subsidies is well adapted to hampering competition, outlawing it entirely or making it impracticable in terms of cost. Public policy is carefully shaped to protect corporate markets -- and accordingly profits -- by discouraging voluntary associations that would otherwise threaten them.

In that the state-corporate system is, by definition, founded on some ratio of protectionist cheating, the state is faced with the problem of providing an explanation for its more noticeable features. Taking advantage of the population's capacity for nationalism and xenophobia, political leaders can rationalize corporate welfare (and its artificially high prices) with the language of protecting American jobs and industries. If arbitrary political boundaries have the economic significance that protectionists imply, however, then their acquiescence to free trade on any geographical level is problematic.

For instance, under the "protecting jobs" rationale, it is unclear why, supposing protectionism is good for the country as a whole, it would be harmful for a state, a county, a city, a neighborhood, or a street. "[T]his absurdity," wrote Murray Rothbard, "is inherent in the logic of protectionism. Standard protectionism is just as preposterous, but the rhetoric of nationalism and national boundaries has been able to obscure this vital fact." Still, none of this is to say that globalization, in its present manifestation, is something we ought to hail as an answer to the trade-averse policies of corporate sheltering.

Although truly free, global trade between self-governing individuals is the ideal, the globalization of today's supposed "flat" world has very little if anything at all to do with simply allowing unobstructed exchange between people. Advocates of free markets too often fall reflexively into extolling the virtues of global markets, failing to notice that today's multinationals accede to their universal presence through the channels of the state, not the free market. Specialization of labor, comparative advantage -- the many advantages of trade that Rothbard observed are completely severable from the mercantilist program of privilege he so hated (and that we have today).

Completely wed to the state, Big Business pries open its foreign markets alongside the American military, planting its factories on indigenous populations ripe for exploitation. We can be sure that, when all is said and done in Seoul, the ruling class will find a way to make things work for their respective states. Equally certain is the bleak reality that their "solutions" will not work for the rest of us, for the mass of people all over the world who do not have the option of using force to extract our livelihood, and who wouldn't if we could.

Ludwig von Mises wrote that "[t]here are two kinds of social cooperation: cooperation by virtue of contract and coordination, and cooperation by virtue of command and subordination or hegemony." The cooperation going on at the G20 summit represents the latter kind, the kind in which men compete not in peaceful, creative contests, but in struggles to control what others may do with their property.

C4SS Contributing Writer David D'Amato is a market anarchist lawyer (he hopes you won't hold it against him) currently completing an LL.M. at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.