Don Quijones — Sir James Goldsmith, An Unlikely Defender of the Common Man

“The economy is there to serve the fundamental needs of society, which are prosperity, stability and contentment… If you have a situation whereby the economy grows but you create poverty and unemployment and you destabilise society, you’re in trouble."

The above quote comes from the least likely of sources: the late Sir James Goldsmith, one of the wealthiest and most influential business magnates of the late 20th century. The year was 1994, the occasion an interview with Charlie Rose on the potential impact of the soon-to-be-signed General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade(GATT).

Goldsmith laid out in simple terms the dangers of what he saw as unfettered globalisation, warning of the perils of NAFTA, GATT and the merging of sovereign European nations into the EU. He predicted that the only possible beneficiaries of unbridled global free trade would be the major multinational corporations who would have free rein to roam the globe in pursuit of the cheapest labor:

Raging Bull-shitSir James Goldsmith, An Unlikely Defender of the Common Man
Don Quijones

These ‘free trade’ ideologues are economically incompetent. They do not know that the justification for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage, which means that a country specializes in those economic activities in which it performs best and trades for those goods that other countries do best. Instead, the ideologues think that free trade means the freedom of capital to seek absolute advantage abroad in lowest factor cost. In other words, the free trade incompetents have never read David Ricardo, who formalized the case for free trade.”