We are talking about 2 things here, one is the trade and the other is free market. To trade is to give in exchange for something such as commodity, money, or papers of value.
Commodity exchange or bartering is known as the earliest form of trade. It started as early as the beginning of human history. Hunters would trade their flesh for produce. Even fresh fruits producer would trade for vegetable. And carrots would trade for pumpkins.
When trading became complicated, mediums such as stone, metal, and later coins and paper money are used to trade. Today we are trading papers of shares, bills, promissory notes, and all kinds of future instrument. And as technology is moving us into a paperless society, we will soon be trading the intangibles.
Looking at the other dimension of trade in promoting freedom, history has also leaned towards such tendency. Trades from east to west and west back to east witnessed a flow of culture, knowledge, philosophy exchanges, and among them freedom was being promoted. King Rama V of Siam revoked the slavery law after he returned from his journeyed west to promote trade and learned of the new development in treating human being.
With all these historical evidences in trading, we can certainly conclude that trade does improve our standard of living and promote freedom.
Free markets are a different story. To start with, there is no such a thing as free market even we take hold of the self regulated free Laissez-faire market practiced in mid 19th century. Argument that market-forces or the “invisible hand” would balance off any bad elements through competitive market mechanism simply did not work.
Even Adam Smith, father of classical British laissez-faire doctrines, did not believe free market in an absolute sense. He found a place for government activity in public works, such as the building of canals and docks to facilitate trade, and in the regulation of foreign commerce to protect certain home industries.
Markets have been distorted somewhere, somehow and somewhat to the situation we can hardly call it free. The free trade zones of NAFTA, APEC, APEC, AFTA plus Three and plus Five, EU, have never been freed by excluding non members to the markets. Members are violating AFTA tariff reduction in car trades for decades without solution. This is also true to the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed between many trading nations. World Trade Organization (WTO) was set up to regulate trades with greater restriction to free trade.
There are also problems of non-tariff barrier, subsidy, regulation, trade protection and more that hinder free trade. On the private scene, we have Anti-trust, inside-trade, unfair trade practice, corruption, smuggle, that suggest rampage of non free trade practices.
Free market as we call it should thus be more appropriately termed manipulated or controlled or regulated or commanded market.
There is another type of manipulated economic system pioneered by Carl Marx. His philosophy had led many countries in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and Vietnam into employing the Communist closed market systems. Again, history has told us that this type of manipulated market system would not work. We see starvation, hardship, life restriction and many other evil consequences arisen from this closed market system. This led to the total market collapses eventually.
We have seen that all these nations have made a 180 turned from their manipulated market to another type of manipulated market we proudly called free market. Their standard of living has soared during the few short years of practicing new free market manipulation. China, Russia and Vietnam have all enjoyed tremendous economic growth in recent years.
Freedom has also been promoted in an amazing way. I still remember we waited over 8 years to get a visa for my grand mother to leave China for a short visit to Thailand. It took almost 20 years for my own cousin to eventually get the authorization to leave. Today, it will take only a week for you to leave. Would not you call that freedom?
The simple question of whether trade and free markets do improve our standard of living and promote freedom, my answer is “YES”.