The Blind Pursuit Of Principle -- Bartlett, Crook, and the All Or Nothingers

Bruce Bartlett has a typically clueless article over at RCP in which he excoriates the Bush administration for allowing the Doha Round of trade talks to collapse. He's not alone. Writing in the National Journal, Clive Crook accuses the major trading nations of "incompetence," of "capitulation to special interests" and of "an utter lack of ambition and leadership." Jesse Walker, writing in Reason Online, sees the collapse as a triumph for ADM at the expense of the world's poor. The problem, you see, is that the US, the EU and other major traders were unable to agree on a formula for reducing or eliminating agricultural subsidies that disadvantage third world producers.

No doubt these critics are right, as far as they go. Agricultural subsidies do run contrary to free trade ideology, they do bias trade against poor third-world producers, and they do hurt consumers to some extent. But that is just the big picture -- there are other perspectives to be considered. Unfortunately Bartlett and the other critics are hopelessly addicted to big picture solutions. They see nothing else. They are "All Or Nothingers" -- ideologues who seek principled, all inclusive, blanket solutions to problems regardless of their political practicability or costs, and refuse to consider anything less than universal adherence to principle to be contemptible.

In the matter of eliminating and reducing agricultural subsidies the Bush administration may have failed to agree to a universal, principled, coercive regime [assuming that to be desirable] but it has made considerable progress nonetheless. As Michael Barone recently pointed out:

the zone of free trade continues to expand as the United States, during this administration, negotiates one free-trade agreement after another -- Oman and Jordan, Central America and Australia, Peru and Colombia.

That is an accomplishment worth applauding, but for the All Or Nothingers, anything short of a universal agreement is to be condemned as a violation of principle.

But it might be argued that attempts to secure a universal, coercive, principled system would be counter-productuve. Such a system would rob nations of the flexibility necessary to cope with a rapidly changing world economic environment. Bartlett, for instance, castigates President Bush for his willingness to impose temporary tariffs on steel imports at a time when the US steel industry was in trouble. Strict [one might say blind] adherence to free trade principles would prohibit such a measure, and Bartlett accuses Bush of having capitulated to Congress and mere political pressure in the matter. But to make such a charge is to fundamentally misunderstand what the presidency is all about.

George Bush was not elected President in order to uphold abstract theories or principles, but to do the best he can to protect and serve the interests of the American people, and that includes Pennsylvania steelworkers. Bush hardly acted unilaterally in the matter. Regarding steel tariffs Congress and the President -- the elected representatives of the American people -- were in agreement and the administration's action was reviewed the WTO whose decision, once it was made, was honored rather than repudiated. The trade regime survived intact and the steel industry got an important "breathing space" within which to adjust to changes in the international markets, and in the end a rigid, unforgiving system was manipulated so as to produce a humane and eminently sensible result.

But Bartlett scorns all this as a "cynical" and "disingenuous" ploy and a capitulation to special interests. The cost of Bush's actions, he argues, was to undermine the credibility of US trade negotiators which made a general agreement harder to achieve. Maybe so, but a general agreement that would have brought economic hardship to a major American industry and an entire region of the country is hard to justify and Bush actiions, while offensive to purists like Bartlett, can reasonably be seen as a necessary concession of principle to the hard exigencies of the real world.

And reasonability is something that is sadly lacking in the arguments of the All Or Nothingers. Their rigid adherence to principle and the big picture would make the perfect the enemy of the good and would radically restrict the ability of the elected leaders of a sovereign nation to fulfill their most important function -- to protect the public they represent and their interests. In fact, it might be argued, that piecemeal negotiations between and among sovereign states is the best, most humane, and most durable form for an international trade regime to take -- the only one that can take into account the special situations in which participant countries find themselves. But this is not for the All Or Nothingers -- for them one size fits all, and if not, there is always the Procrustean solution.

A troubling number of commentators these days seem to be addicted to the vision of comprehensive, rational solutions handed down from high by unelected experts. That is unfortunate. We have seen in the history of the Twentieth Centuy what horrors the unrestrained pursuit of principle can produce. Democracy may be messy, so too the situational, partial, and conditional agreements negotiated among sovereign nations, but I would argue that they are far more humane in their application than the glorious rationalistic visions that would be imposed upon us by the ideologues, both left and right.

So the Doha round of talks collapsed. That may be unfortunate, but it is hardly the catastrophe the All Or Nothingers make it out to be. And maybe, just maybe, the regime that is emerging out of bilateral and multilateral negotiations among sovereign nations will be an improvement on what Doha aimed at producing.

UPDATE:

Rich Karlgaard, writing in Forbes, agrees:

Bartlett is a thinker turned zealot. Take him with a lump of salt.

Read it here.