Congressman Ron Paul is a Republican Presidential hopeful for 2008. Ideologically, he is a libertarian, and he was the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 1988. This shouldn’t align libertarians with Republicans in your mind, so much as go to show you that Party names mean very little.

Ron Paul has this to say about so-called free trade agreements on his campaign site:

So called free trade deals and world governmental organizations like the International Criminal Court (ICC), NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are a threat to our
independence as a nation. They transfer power from our government
to unelected foreign elites.

The ICC wants to try our soldiers as war criminals. Both the WTO and CAFTA could force Americans to get a doctor’s prescription to take herbs and vitamins. Alternative treatments could be banned.

The WTO has forced Congress to change our laws, yet we still face trade wars. Today, France is threatening to have U.S. goods taxed throughout Europe. If anything, the WTO makes trade relations worse by giving foreign competitors a new way to attack U.S. jobs.

NAFTA’s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme.

From Bloomberg Asia:

The U.S. and South Korea reached a free-trade accord worth as much as $29 billion that if ratified would be the largest for the U.S. since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

Bhatia told reporters after the press conference that he wished rice had been included in the accord. About half of South Korean farmers grow rice, and duties keep prices about four times that of the world average, according to a report by the American University in Washington.

“We were pushing rice all the way up until the very end,'’ Bhatia said. “We will look to continually raise the rice issue with our counterparts.'’

Yet another “Free Trade” agreement that only applies to specific imports and exports. I’m not an economist, but it seems to me that the theory of Free Trade is such that the benefits can only be completely realized when the tariffs on all products are removed. Whether you believe Free Trade is good or not isn’t important as long as you can accept that by these two countries calling their accord a “Free Trade” agreement, they obviously think so. And if it’s good, why wouldn’t the standard of living everywhere be raised if Free Trade policies were applied more universally? And if it would, then why not do it? And if the argument is that it will negatively affect certain industries in this country, then why not call this agreement what it is, which is essentially a mutual bribe that represents no real interest in the fundamental issue of Free Trade?

According to the 2007 Index of Economic Freedom from The Heritage Foundation, the United States ranks fourth behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. This year’s methodology was revised, which might account for America’s rise on the list (#9 in 2006 index), but still, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia aren’t often thought of (on this side of the Pacific Ocean) as bastions of Capitalism, and yet there they are– ahead of the United States.

Economic freedom, by itself, doesn’t paint a complete picture of any society, which is to say that such a ranking is just that, and little more. However, it should give us ( and hopefully policymakers, too) pause when considering the state of things in America.