Additional and Dissenting Views" Heidi S. Cruz wrote (pp. 33-34)/caption
Conservatives and libertarians are renowned for desiring the greatest possible autonomy with respect to the free market. This phenomena in fact aided in igniting the shot heard round the world" April 19 1775 at Lexington and Concord. History teaches high school students the economic principle behind the French term laissez-faire or to let be". Free market economics were born from centuries of intercolonial trade within the British Empire and others known as mercantilism. Tariffs were placed on commodities in transit from markets outside these colonial domains as a protectionist approach to preserve imperial interests. Whether there was mercantilism or laissez-faire polity involving international trade one thing is certain: there has never existed a nation that subsisted while enforcing any isolationist foreign policy. Global interactions through trade always preclude such a possibility if for nothing else than the lack in abundance of natural resources and raw materials by some who consume such goods from those countries thriving off them.
A Trans-Pacific free trade pact would result in far more than merely unregulated immigration and undercutting the American peoples capacity to compete for jobs. It holds the potential for a Pangaea effect under a supranational socialist state and its red-headed stepsister corporatism. It would lead to an unprecedented dystopia born of globalization through the imposition of an inevitable single currency.
That was what Heidi Cruz wife of current Texas senator and GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz foresaw in her dissent written near the conclusion of the Council of Foreign Affairs Building a North American Community in both the benefits and dangers involved in a central regulatory body killing what makes free trade free a central governing body pledged to withdraw American trade and security interests inextricably into protectionism as well as loss of immigration regulatory oversight resulted from this loss in sovereignty as with the European Union to an undemocratically-elected governing body.
Most scholars attribute the laissez-faire concept to Adam Smiths invisible hand". Legend has it however that in 1681 a conference between French foreign minister Jean Baptiste Colbert and a cartel of domestic businessmen led by M. Le Gendre convened on how better to expand French maritime and intercontinental trade. Upon the pro-mercantilist Colbert inquiring what the French government could provide to better expedite trade and expand commerce Le Gendres reply was simply Laissez nous faire" or literally let us be". No doubt then Le Gendre referred to taxation and tariffs on imported goods.
The legend was revisited in a 1751 issue Journal Oeconomique by pro-free trade minister Ren de Voyer Marquis dArgenson in what is recognized as the first known instance of the term and its concept in print. The Marquis dArgenson had himself employed it in a diary rant recorded in 1736.
Let it be that should be the motto of all public powers since the world was civilized… That we cannot grow except by lowering our neighbors is a detestable notion! Only malice and malignity of heart is satisfied with such a principle and our (national) interest is opposed to it. Let it be for heavens sake! Let it be!
The actual term laissez-term however was popularized in truth by the philosophe Vincent de Gornay during the 1750s when he applied it in Franois Quesnays papers regarding China. The term Quesnay coined is a direct transliteration of the Cantonese term wu wei" ( 無為) and mo wei".
Unlike communism the crux of the Age of Enlightenments intellectual expansion into the field of economics is attributed to Adam Smiths reference to natural law known as the invisible hand". But like his two contemporary economic theorists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo Smith never actually used laissez-faire in his work. He actually applied the invisible hand" nomenclature in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 laying the philosophical groundwork on the state of nature in the human application of ethics methodology and psychology for future pieces like The Wealth of Nations (1776).
Smiths position on this fundamental economic principle relies on four postulates leading to truths with respect to human nature and its conduct towards their fellow man.
1. The individual is the basic unit in society.
2. The individual has a natural right to freedom.
3. The physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system.
4. Corporations are creatures of the State and therefore must be watched closely by the citizenry due to their propensity to disrupt the Smithian spontaneous order.
In reading Smith one can trace the employment of unchecked corporate expansion as tools of the state inevitably leading to socialism under Marxs conditions for industrialized nations that fall prey to disenchanted alienated proletarians as a result of the bourgeoisies vices. The policy of trust busting under President Theodore Roosevelt ended the alarming rise in corporate monopolies that not only usurped the individual imperative but the power of the federal government to govern as it was democratically-elected. Prior to Teddy Roosevelt the rights of the individual were quashed their voices silenced through massive accumulations of wealth while working conditions and poverty grew more pervasive through factory slums and ghettos that housed their morbidly poor employees. While Marxism called for the abolition of all self-sufficiency in favor of a central authority serving as the dictatorship of the proletariat corporatism followed the Fabian Society model of gradual usurpations of individual liberty through social Darwinist evolutionary principles often in bankrolling many of its initiatives and nationalizing private enterprise.
Through corporate welfare from taxpayer money or Marxism few actual winners will ever emerge. Free speech and constitutional liberty will inevitably die once corporatists intermarry with militant labor unions manifesting global socialism through a central regulatory body such as the United Nations (U.N.) having consolidated all political economic power.
The invisible hand" theory truly possesses tremendous virtue. Applied too literally and the rise of an unintended consequence will lead to malevolent forces stripping what liberties to the individual remain. For example Reuters columnist David Jay Johnston reported July 16 2012 the IRS and Federal Reserve undervalued the Flow of Funds from non-financial U.S. corporations in liquid assets that May. The striking figure was by how much.
The Feds latest Flow of Funds report showed that U.S. nonfinancial companies held $1.7 trillion in liquid assets at the end of March. But newly released IRS figures show that in 2009 these companies held $4.8 trillion in liquid assets which equals $5.1 trillion in todays dollars triple the Fed figure.
The Fed receives its data from the IRS which only measures the flow of funds domestically. And this is where free trade agreements fall on deaf ears for both statists and advocates of this unintrusive nature of economic trends and growth transnationally.
Again Johnston reports staggering figures which understate why the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is an abject failure based on the European Union. The E.U. is on the brink of total collapse due to free trade and unregulated immigration the welfare state becoming overtaxed both in resources housing benefits for migrant workers residing in other nations the publics dwindling incomes in the dying eurozone and finally the evolution of Euroscepticism to the majority of the British peoples demand to exit the federal body on the continent.
First Congress lets overseas profits accumulate untaxed so long as offshore subsidiaries own the cash. Second companies have a hard time putting cash to work because fewer jobs and lower wages mean less demand for products and services. Third a thick pile of cash gives risk-averse CEOs a nice cushion if the economy worsens.
Given the enduring hard times you might think that corporations have used up their cash since 2009. But real pretax corporate profits have soared from less than $1.5 trillion in 2009 to $1.9 trillion in 2010 and almost $2 trillion in 2011 data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis shows.
That is nearly $1 trillion of increased profits over two years while actual taxes paid rose less than a tenth as much BEA reports show. Dividends wages and capital expenditures all grew less than profits while undistributed profits rose. The result: more cash.
Bigger profits are good news but it would have been better news had those increased profits been put to work not laid off in accounts paying modest interest. Hoarding corporate cash in bank accounts Treasuries and tax-exempt bonds poses a serious threat to the economy as Congress recognized when it enacted the corporate income tax in 1909.
Taxation is itself state-sanctioned theft. Tax exemptions and bailouts granted following the global financial market crash of 2008 led to an equally insidious ploy by corporate moguls to engage in business mergers and acquisitions or globalization. Relaxing taxation levels both with income taxes as well as for businesses while employing the Teddy Roosevelt strategy of trust busting maintains American jobs at home while simultaneously granting greater access to entrepreneurship for prospective small business owners discouraging corporate and capital flight to nations with cheaper labor in contrast to the disastrous Clinton-era NAFTA folly.
Socialism either nationalized or under the control of corporate monopolies discourages thrift and instead profits off the woes of their citizens and employees. To place into further perspective consider the following too.
The 2009 cash reported to the IRS equaled Americas entire economic output that year from New Years Day through May Day.
This cash pool came to $16700 for every man woman and child in the United States a 53 percent real increase from 2004 my calculations from IRS data show.
Looked at yet another way these companies had 11.3 percent of their assets in cash or enough to pay their 2009 corporate income tax bills which amounted to $148 billion more than 34 times over.
Such protections of the individual imperative from corporate mergers into large monopolistic conglomerates can be attributed to actions taken against the robber barons" of the late 19th/early 20th Century (Rockefeller Carnegie Morgan Vanderbilt) or in the case of J.P. Morgan financing it. Below are reasons why this has grown problematic.
For workers idle cash means idle hands and minds. With one in five Americans unemployed or underemployed and real median wages in 2010 back down to the level of 1999 this is no time for capital to go on an extended holiday.
For taxpayers untaxed profits subtly reduce corporate tax burdens and increase the tax burden on individuals. Because taxes owed on offshore profits are not adjusted for inflation they depreciate at the rate of inflation. That means a double whammy for taxpayers as government pays interest on money it borrows while its accounts receivable from multinational corporations lose value.
Since the income tax system began Congress has authorized a tax on excessive accumulated earnings to limit damage to the Treasury and the economy when companies hold far more cash than their operations require. Without the accumulated earnings tax corporations can become bloated tax shelters instead of engines of growth.
A business holding more cash than its operations reasonably require can be hit with a 15 percent levy under Section 531 of the Internal Revenue Code on top of the 35 percent corporate income tax. The Tax Court even devised a mechanical test in 1965 for how much is too much.
While the IRS historically only levies taxes on private firms and corporate public trade businesses with few stockholders this strategy was emphatically reinforced with Ronald Reagans signing Section 532 © of the Internal Revenue Code that empowered the terms of Section 531 for all firms with a few exceptions of untaxed offshore profits. Much of these issues were mitigated greatly by the Reagan-era hard antitrust policies. Unfortunately the latter trend in its symbiosis has not continued and led to Reagans signed bill granting work visas in exchange for foreigners paying taxes for income earned while here into the hell good intentions go to die. The idea was articulated by Reagan in a 1980 GOP primary debate.
Rather than… talking about putting up a fence why dont we… make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit? Then while theyre working and earning here they pay taxes here and when they want to go back they can go back."
The cash hoarding exemptions continued growing worse never more so than under Barack Obama who presides over a Wall Street as the centerpiece to as his casino economics policy. As greater more deregulated exemptions lead to repurchasing stock options such as with the Alibaba Trojan horse from China purely domestic firms are discriminated against and during times of economic distress jobs lost.
Johnston made another excellent observation. Multinational corporations pledge to return to America what it robbed. They pledge to return some $1 trillion should Congress provide them an 85 percent tax discount.
Yet all it yields are more casino economic policies most especially under liberal policies as these corporate raiders are overwhelmingly supportive of Democrats after all it was none other than George Soros who crashed the Bank of England and the pound sterling September 16 1992 (Black Wednesday") which he at present is engaged in with the Russian ruble since the fall of the pro Putin government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in early 2014.
Perhaps no one summarized the dangers of free trade better than Heidi Cruz when she dissented as to what ultimately is the death to any such agreement: government oversight that would lead to a loss in sovereignty and the nations of North America slipping into protectionism.
I support the Task Force report and its recommendations aimed at building a safer and more prosperous North America. Economic prosperity and a world safe from terrorism and other security threats are no doubt inextricably linked. While governments play an invaluable role in both regards we must emphasize the imperative that economic investment be led and perpetuated by the private sector. There is no force proven like the market for aligning incentives sourcing capital and producing results like financial markets and profit-making businesses. This is simply necessary to sustain a higher living standard for the poorest among ustruly the measure of our success. As such investment funds and financing mechanisms should be deemed attractive instruments by those committing the capital and should only be developed in conjunction with market participants."
Heidi Cruz writing in the Council of Foreign Affairs Building a North American Community in section Additional and Dissenting Views" (pp. 33-34)
Council of Foreign Relations: Building a North American Community
That said buyer beware. Do not sign dotted lines of documents not yet presented. Between militant labor unions and tax exemptions on multinational corporations a small collection will win while the 99 percent always lose. President Reagans position on immigration was well-intentioned and in principle wonderful. Unfortunately in quoting perhaps the most famous song regarding the progression of society by Bob Dylan the times they are a changin" and it is no longer a matter of merely keeping tabs on undocumented aliens entering to work for peanuts and still earn more through public welfare but of national security. And once a nation signs into a free trade pact and engages in draconian protectionist policies with respect to outside governments the options are limited until future expansions lead to a geopolitical Pangaea by way of a single currency and common market neo-mercantilism. Unless an aggressive antitrust policy is strategically in place too much of a good thing is really not a good thing at all.