Making a Market in Morality

One of the glories of being a modern—dare I coin it? —metropreneur, is that between trying to figure out how to net my next ten grand, I have a few minutes to ponder the whole free-trade issue, right along with Safire (I’m an optimist and welcome to my happy world) and Herbert (US jobs? Buy now, bye later, so slam the door, bub).

As we appear now on the brink of “to tariff or not to tariff,” a modest proposal: Let’s make a “survivor” game of it. “Call it Freedom Trade,” like “Free Trade,” but with a twist.

This game would favor those who did well by doing good. In broad strokes, if you foster freedom, you get our best trade deals.

Here’s how to play:

- Make up a point system for the Constitution and its amendments. Easy enough. Say ten points for “Freedom of Speech” and 1 point for “The Defense of Marriage Act,” or whatever it gets called. Not zero. Everyone gets, via voting, a right to weigh in on our trade policy. Estimated time to work out in Congress? A year should do it, yes?
- Grade tariff rates by item or service (yes apply them to phone call centers in India, too) according to this code. Thus, if you use slave labor to make those shoes, deduct ten points. Prison labor, minus five, ageism in the workplace, minus one. You get the picture.
- Countrywide behavior also gets scored. Women can’t drive? Minus 5. Women bought and sold? Minus 10. There are various rankings for countries by any number of councils and organization. Use them in some fashion to shape measurements of our constitutional rights and freedoms.
- Use the revenue from the tariff on something, like steel, to offer a rebate to buyers of the same thing made in America, thus making our domestic goods and services more specifically competitive in a clear, transparent and motivating manner. If you have a more “constitutional” society, then you get dinged less. This makes foreign and U.S. goods more evenly priced.

More important than turning trade into a clear game with clear rules, like Poker, though, is the point of the game. The point of the “trade game” in the real world is not just about getting Americans the best quality of living at the cheapest price, is it? Those cheap sneakers, that cheap oil also costs the price of our military actions. Apologies to Clausewitz, but trade, like war, is an extension of diplomacy. Carrot and stick. Figured that way, I just spent about 800 bucks last year on that pair of sneakers that cost me $35.

The issue is not the real price of my sneakers; it is not even economic at all. It’s about putting the money to work to further the revolution. Before we all start tie dying, though, I mean the real revolution. The one that created this country, winning Americans' hearts and minds in the first place. The one that has and continues to spread the far better life of “constitutional freedom” to more places—and some day, still, to all.

Some day, freedom and justice for all. That’s where the trade game comes in.

Today “All” is expanding rapidly as our economic and social worlds become a single global enterprise, albeit with some very different neighborhoods. One sneaker at a time, we connect ourselves with those we buy from and sell to. To win their hearts and minds isn’t it time we put our own Constitution, and what it says about the social contract and fair play, into our code of conduct in multinational business dealings?

It’s a reasonably complicated game to get right in the details, I admit. But simple, and vital, enough to start playing now.

Maybe it’s more complex than diplomacy, but it’s a hell of a lot simpler than war. ¶ 11:35 AM

  Just Business

With all the goings on about loose nukes, time again to think about the unthinkable. In my case this leads to a question: Why don’t we just buy the damnable things C.O.D. from people (countries) who have them? How much? Maybe $10 million; maybe $100 million. Are we talking wholesale or retail? We’ve established who we are; now it’s just business.

Doing what we do best. Like they say, the business of America is business. All credit to the trigger-pullers on the ground and the master tacticians who GPSified and computerized the blitzkrieg. The strategists above them, however, are businessmen, arguably good at it. Yet they’ve eschewed a business approach, which has worked to keep the aspirations of those in a large and oil-rich area in check fairly well for a century or so…this time around. This time they turned to muscle.

Now people are dealing nuclear materiel on the open market, looking for a little more muscle themselves. Nuke pieces have become a commodity, like silver or soybeans…or hand grenades at a Baghdad arms’ bazaar.

I like business. Compared to war, pestilence, famine, homelessness and disease, it’s often cruel but less prone to real pain in the literal sense. Playing with money for keeps is better than playing with swords for keeps. And nukes are way further from swords than swords are from plowshares. Farther, too. Fifty megatons set off in Manhattan, as I recall it, and that copy of the Times you’re sitting 80 miles away reading on the deck in Litchfield, Conn., would burst into flames in your hands.

America gets to choose how to appear to the World these days. Tough or clever, honest or crooked, fair but tough, a sharp businessman, flinty-eyed and steely-nerved, or a tough thug.

So let’s support a program to buy nukes from other countries! Be bankers not muscle! Encourage others to play business with us. Negotiate. That’s really what it’s about, isn’t it? Everyone using leverage to make a deal?

Now, in all fairness, the money involved would be substantial. It would probably dwarf the Iraq bill, the deficit, the debt, etc. etc.

It would cost way more than flying people to Mars (and back) and is about as likely to be a permanent solution as whatever Pro baseball decides to do about steroid abuse.

But we could give anyone turning over a nuke a loan, a mortgage, offer IPOs on the profits of companies taking apart the damned things in Texas, create derivatives like they are doing on the unemployment numbers, whatever. Certainly, clever American businessmen on Wall Street can figure something out.

Near as I can tell if the money is put out there these places will become markets, people will buy things. Affluence will lead to higher wages, more freedom, and slowly erode the huge labor cost disparity between the West and the rest. This in turn will make it competitive to keep jobs in the West. Eventually.

Yes, yes, it’s a radioactive variation on the wonderful old Marshall Plan. What was wonderful was that it loaned people American money to use to buy American products, so the tax money fueled wage growth and employment.

A way everyone wins something. Folks with the bombs get to sell them to us. We already have so many that a few more won’t make us significantly more dangerous.

Even if we don’t get them all, which it mightily behooves us to, just getting nukes off the street one at a time makes more sense, to me, than jumpstarting the economy with a Mars voyage or a new war on steroid use in baseball.

After all, every nuke bought is one less able to ever fall into the wrong hands, terrorist or not, turning them into an instant global power. And the thing about power; it lets folks do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. ¶ 12:45 PM