True Free Trade Does Not Require Treaties or Agreements between Governments; True Free Trade Occurs in the Absence of Government Intervention

In spite of my strong support for free trade, I have felt compelled to oppose many of the trade agreements that have appeared in recent years. For instance, although I was not in Congress at the time, I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment. Initial grounds for suspicion was the sheer length of the text of these agreements: no free-trade agreement needs to be 20,000 pages long.

Many, though not all, supporters of the free market supported these agreements. Very different was the situation nearly six decades ago when the International Trade Organization was up for debate. At that time, conservatives and libertarians agreed that supranational trade bureaucracies with the power to infringe upon American sovereignty were undesirable and unnecessary. Businessman Philip Cortney, a close friend of the great free-market economist Ludwig von Mises, led the charge against the WTO with his book The Economic Munich. Henry Hazlitt, author of the libertarian classic Economics in One Lesson, included Cortney's book against the WTO in The Free Man's Library, his annotated reading list of books important to the study of freedom. . . .

To establish genuine free trade, no such transfer of power [to the WTO] is necessary. True free trade does not require treaties or agreements between governments. On the contrary, true free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders. Organizations like the WTO and NAFTA represent government-managed trade schemes, not free trade. The WTO, purported to exist to lower tariffs, is actually the agency that grants permission for tariffs to be applied when complaints of dumping are levied. Government-managed trade is inherently political, meaning that politicians and bureaucrats determine who wins and loses in the marketplace.

--Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2008), 95-97.