Thread by @retsonbiz

THE LIES OF FREE TRADE & Why Nigeria Must Keep Protecting Her Own at Whatever Cost Particularly in Agriculture.
In His Book Kicking Away The Ladder by Prof Hajoon Chang, He Noted That the developed countries did not get where they are now through the policies and the institutions

2. that they recommend to developing countries today. Most of them actively used 'bad' trade and industrial policies, such as infant industry protection and export subsidies - practices that these days are frowned upon, if not actively banned, by the WTO. Until they were quite

3. developed (that is, until the late nineteenth to early
The nineteenth-century German economist Friedrich List (1789-1846) in one of His summary of the British road to industrial success worth quoting at length Said: “Having attained to a certain grade of development by means

4. of free trade, the great monarchies [of Britain] perceived that the highest degree of civilization, power, and wealth can only be attained by a combination of manufactures and commerce with agriculture. They perceived that their newly established native manufactures could

5. never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners [the Italians, the Hansards, the Belgians, and the Dutch] ... Hence they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant on to their native

6. soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners.”
To him, therefore, the preachings on the virtues of free trade by British politicians and economists of his time were done for nationalistic purposes, even though they were cast in the generalistic

7. languages of what he calls 'cosmopolitical doctrine'. He is worth quoting again at length on this point:
“It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others

8. of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations. Any nation which by

9. means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throwaway these ladders of her greatness,

10. to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth.”
For the last 30 years or so, the West has forced the developing

11. world to accept neo-liberal economic “reforms” – the unrestricted movement of goods and capital, balanced budgets, privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes – as a condition for economic assistance. But consider the following:
“You are visiting a developing country as a

12. policy analyst. It has the highest average tariff rate in the world. Most of the population cannot vote, and vote buying and electoral fraud are widespread.
“The country has never recruited a single civil servant through an open process. Its public finances are precarious,

13. with loan defaults that worry investors. It has no competition law, has abolished its shambolic bankruptcy law, and does not acknowledge foreigners' copyrights. In short, it is doing everything against the advice of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the international

14. investment community.
“Sounds like a recipe for development disaster? But no. The country is the US - only that the time is around 1880, when its income level was similar to that of Morocco and Indonesia today. Despite wrong policies and sub-standard institutions, it was then

15. one of the fastest-growing - and rapidly becoming one of the richest - countries in the world.” (History debunks the free trade myth, Ha-Joon Chang, Guardian, 24 June 2002)
At this time, Britain was preaching free trade to the world, having become rich on the basis of

16. protectionism, not to mention the slave trade and plunder. The following was the response of US President, Ulysses S Grant, to this preaching:
“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it.

17. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country

18. leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” (quoted in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America by AG Frank, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1967).
Once the US had become

19. the most powerful economic power in the world after World War II, it also began to preach free trade to the world.
“The concept of ‘free trade’ arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics. If you can make something that others value, you should be

20. able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person—or a nation—to make a living.
One doesn’t have to be a genius to realise that the US conversion from the principle of tariff

21. protection to the principle, if not the practice, of free trade has got more than a little to do with its own economic interest, just as it was in the case of Britain a century earlier.
Ha-Joon Chang is One of Late Professor Moses E. U. Tedheke Favourite Author. Hajoon Chang

22. has written several informative book on the environment in which Western countries developed, an environment that is very different to that which the West seeks to impose on developing countries today. One of such book his Titled

23. "Kicking Away the Ladder - Development Strategy in Historical Perspective and was published in 2002 by Anthem Press, London.]
This Book and Similar Books Like This Will Populate the Library!