Justified Contempt

Also published in the Canberra Times on 22.01.2000 as "Protests against WTO a case of never mind the consequences, feel the pretension"

It has long been an open question which group or institution in Australian public life engages in behaviour most worthy of contempt.

Is it the ABC, paid for by the taxes of all Australians but which deigns to flatter the opinions only of a narrow slice (and to sneer at the opinions of a much larger slice), whose staff are currently whining that the Party of Menzies will not give it more public money when sneering at all Menzies stood for is the posture of choice for so many ABC staff:  a spectacle at once unctuous and pathetic?

Is it humanities and social science academia, using the taxes of working-class families to fund middle-class advantage processing educational certification of diminishing worth, rife with the betrayal of their pedagogical duties and intellectual heritage (either actively or in silent compliance) to purvey an obscurantist pomposity which sneers at human achievements past and present in order to polish an overweening moral vanity?

Is it the education unions, in their stringent avoidance of real accountability as they relentlessly defend teaching mediocrity, doing their best to ensure that public schools imitate soviet production methods with soviet-style results of increasing cost and decreasing quality so that their most lively function is to propagandise (badly) at our children?

Is it the unions in general, reacting to the refusal of new workers to engage their dubious, overpriced services by strong-arming State ALP Governments into giving them ever more outrageous legislative privileges in the hope that state coercion can corral more members than their current mere fifth (and falling) of the private-sector workforce?

A difficult question to answer indeed.  Fortunately, the spectacle in Seattle at the WTO conference has clinched the title.  The groups in Australian public life whose behaviour is most worthy of contempt are those advocacy non-government organisations (NGOs) -- the ACFs, Greenpeaces, Community Aid Abroads and their ilk -- who have used their (massively overblown) reputation for altruism and their almost complete lack of accountability to do their bit to trash a major Australian national interest.

First, a bit of history and a smattering of economics.

The World Trade Organisation is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).  The GATT was set up as part of the postwar settlement which sought to ensure there was not another World War.  The single thing which most made the Great Depression of the 1930s so severe was the destruction of international trade by "beggar-thy-neighbour" protection policies.  Countries competed in raising tariffs against each other, sending them all spiralling down into mutually-assured economic destruction.  Out of the Depression came Hitler and the rest is history:  and tens of millions of dead and devastated countries.  Something not to be repeated.

Hence the GATT, an organisation membership of which (like the WTO) has always been entirely voluntary.  You didn't have to play if you didn't want to.  But all countries who wish to trade internationally have an interest in having a common set of rules under which said trading takes place.  Which is what the GATT, and now the WTO, has provided.

As the failure of command economics has become ever more obvious, more and more countries have wanted to gain the benefits of trade, and so have joined the WTO.  And since, unlike the UN, the WTO is about something specific and real (trade) it has genuine effectiveness, again unlike the UN.  So, what the WTO is really about is common rules so trade continues and grows so the world economy does not get devastated so countries do not experience profound crises leading to who knows where (and, after Hitler, who wants to take the risk?).  And since no one will suffer more than the poor from a major collapse in world trade, the poor are major beneficiaries of the trading regime.

So, if you are in favour of world peace and development, the WTO has to be seen as a good thing.

As to the economics, we need to remember what trade is.  Trade is commercial exchange for mutual gain.  If both sides did not benefit, it would not continue to happen.  It is precisely because commercial exchanges leave both sides better off that we all engage in them, and trade is just such exchanges across national boundaries.  Which is why countries have a common interest in trade and common rules for same.  It is all about mutual gain and mutual benefit.

Which is why the protectionist policies of the 1930s were not only disastrous in effect, they were criminally stupid.  One does not get rich by impoverishing one's customers:  it is much better to own a shop in a rich suburb than a poor one.  And you certainly don't get prosperous, nor recover from an economic down-turn, by raising the cost of products to your own citizens (which is what tariffs do).  Even now, rich countries mostly trade with each other -- because they are the countries whose consumers have the money to buy things.  More wealthy countries mean more people able to buy more of our products.

The WTO is a way for governments to mutually agree not to do stupid things.  Or, to be a bit more precise, to mutually agree to each defend their own general interest against their own special interests clamouring for special privileges.

With the current WTO agenda, Australia is in an enviable position.  There was no significant local interest which was threatened by anything on the agenda, but, as a major food exporter, we stood to gain a great deal from liberalisation of agricultural markets.  Something else which stood to gain a great deal from such liberalisation is the environment.  Agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe encourage land to remain in agricultural production which should not be, and use of attendant chemicals.  They also depress the world prices for many agricultural products, undermining the incomes of developing world farmers.  More generally, the more prosperous people are, the more concerned they are with environmental amenity (since they are less worried about where their next meal, etc. is coming from) and the more able they are to do something about it.

So, peace, environmental concern, higher incomes for the developing world and Australia's national interest all argued for a good result in Seattle.  So, what were Greenpeace, the ACF, Community Aid Abroad, et al doing?  Campaigning strongly against it.  Why?

Their official position is that WTO promotes globalisation and globalisation is bad for democracy, the poor and the environment.  This is a line which does not stand up to even cursory examination and can be dismissed.  What really motivates them is straight institutional interest.

All these bodies are in the moral vanity game.  They sell "warm inner glows" to their supporters.  In Gary Johns' words

NGOs consist of mail-order memberships of the wealthy Left, content to buy their activism and get on with their consumer lifestyle.

Since over a century-and-a-half of polemical endeavour has established that opposing capitalism scores the highest moral vanity points -- and the WTO and globalisation represent capitalism-triumphant -- then being agin the WTO and globalisation is the best game in town for those in the moral vanity game.

What they are really trying to do is to beat up on the WTO so they can be "seen" to be "fighting the good fight" while also hoping to lever their nuisance value into being included in WTO decision-making.  It is a straight play for the danegeld of participation and influence.

And the incomes of Australian and third world farmers?  In the moral vanity game one has to remember the basic principle:  never mind the consequence, feel the pretension.  It was good enough for the apologists of Stalinism, and it is good enough for the anti-globalisation activists.

As for their arguments and antecedents:  who was that guy who used to talk about world-capitalist conspiracies, how malign international forces were secretly plotting to use their wealth to enslave unsuspecting decent people, who thought that nature was the true measure of things, and felt that the environment put strict limits on how many people could live in a certain area?  Was always going on about living space -- lebensraum he called it.  Had a funny moustache ...

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