Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a great champion of free markets and free trade. He is the author of my favorite essay of all time: “Southey’s Colloquies on Society.” Although written in 1830, this stunningly insightful essay’s lessons remain relevant today.
In another essay (“Corn Laws”) — this one a speech delivered in Edinburgh in December 1845 as debate raged throughout Great Britain on whether or not to free that country’s citizens of the tariffs that burdened their purchases of grain — Macaulay spoke forcefully for free trade:
Two parties are ranged in battle array against each other. There is the standard of monopoly. Here is the standard of free trade; and by the standard of free trade I pledge myself to stand firmly.
(Here’s a link to a site containing this essay; you have to scroll down about two-thirds of the way to find the essay.)
One of the most interesting passages from this essay is the one I paste below; it’s almost as if Macaulay had seen ahead 154 years to the ignoramuses and greedy interest groups who coalesced in Seattle in December 1999 to riot against free trade.
They [the opponents of free trade] constantly tell us that the cry against the corn laws [protectionist tariffs that the British government put on grain in order artificially to increase the wealth of British landowners] has been raised by capitalists; that the capitalist wishes to enrich himself at the expense both of the landed gentry and of the working people; that every reduction of the price of food must be followed by a reduction of the wages of labour; and that, if bread should cost only half what it now costs, the peasant and the artisan would be sunk in wretchedness and degradation, and the only gainers would be the millowners and the money changers. It is not only by landowners, it is not only by Tories, that this nonsense has been talked. We have heard it from men of a very different class, from demagogues who wish to keep up the corn laws, merely in order that the corn laws may make the people miserable, and that misery may make the people turbulent. You know how assiduously those enemies of all order and all property have labored to deceive the working man into a belief that cheap bread would be a curse to him. Nor have they always laboured in vain. You remember that once, even in this great and enlightened city, a public meeting called to consider the corn laws was disturbed by a deluded populace. Now, for my own part, whenever I hear bigots who are opposed to all reform, and anarchists who are bent on universal destruction, join in the same cry, I feel certain that it is an absurd and mischievous cry; and surely never was there a cry so absurd and mischievous as this cry against cheap loaves [emphasis added].
Change “cheap loaves” to “cheap goods and services,” and Macaulay’s argument applies in full against both those who disparage the right of consumers freely to purchase imports and those who today hyperventilate in anger against Wal-Mart.
