In doing some preliminary research (looking for good blogs to add to my feeds), I came across an entry in Jonathan Tasini’s Working Life Blog entitled CAFTA fight lives on from August of 2005. In it, he discusses what he says is ‘the nonsence behind the phrase “free trade”‘. He elaborates:

“free trade” does not exist–it’s a marketing phrase intended to blind people by using two words that few people would find objectionable (everyone likes the idea of trading and who is against something that’s FREE!!!)

This kind of talk reminds me of that other famous ‘free’ — the one in ‘free software’. Stallman’s saying for elaborating that free is ‘free as in free speech, not as in free beer‘.

It also is, as Tasini rightly points out, that part of the politics behind these agreements is the language used — as any politician can tell you. Any geek can as well — there is an entire debate over the terms ‘open source’ versus ‘free software’, with many people (myself included) often compromising with FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

The only other term that I can think of for the agreements (as opposed to the concept generally) is ‘regional trade agreements’, which is the phrase used in the (excellent) new book Regional Trade Agreements and the WTO Legal System edited by Edinburgh academic Lorand Bartels and Federico Ortino (I just got it for this project).

So should this blog be called the ‘regional trade blog’?

One answer is simply that ‘Free Trade Agreement’ is much more popular than the alternative (1 million+ hits versus 58,000 on Google) and therefore is the better in terms of site recognition and accepted use.

Another answer would be that ‘free trade’ is the simply the name of the market concept that is driving these agreements, even if the result is less than the pure concept. ‘Free trade’ is the condition where trade is not restricted by tariff or non-tariff barriers. I’ll be posting more about the concept, and its relationship to IP and IT, in the coming weeks and months.

This post also triggered memories of discussing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in undergraduate anthropology classes. In short, Sapir-Whorf is a hypothesis about how language shapes thought (or vice versa). The idea reinforces the need to be clear and concise in picking words when discussing these issues. I’ll concede that speaking and writing about all the concepts inherent in these agreements as ‘free trade’ may indeed obfuscate the real impact of these agreements.

However, getting to the real impact is exactly what this study is about, and we aim to provide detailed materials about both the big picture issues as well as what these agreements mean to individual businesses on the ground.

As a side note, Adam Smith was, of course, one of the first free trade theorist. His grave is, amaazingly enough, down the street from my office — maybe I’ll have to pay it a visit and reflect on the impact one book can have on the whole world.