Who can argue with freedom? This is a common and surprisingly effective method of persuasion: to slap the label of "free" on whatever cause one is supporting. Just look at all the people who call elephant dung and campaign contributions "free speech," thus miraculously turning their mundane issues into First Amendment debates, and their opponents into totalitarians.

So too have those who support the World Trade Organization deemed themselves "free traders." It is a curious sort of freedom they advocate: where the WTO is free to regulate and restrict, and everyone else is free to follow their orders.

What is the WTO?

The World Trade Organization was created on January 1, 1995, as the result of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. It was created to enforce the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). At the same time, GATT was expanded to include not only regulation of tariffs, but also "non-tariff barriers to trade."

These non-tariff barriers are generally laws that somehow affect international trade. Any law that can be interpreted to favor domestic industry at the expense of foreign industry is illegal under GATT. The WTO has the power to declare such laws illegal, and to enact sanctions against any country that refuses to change its laws when they are challenged. In the past four years, over one hundred regulations in various countries have been challenged, and the WTO has struck down every one of them.

A wide variety of people oppose the WTO. There are those, like Pat Buchanan, who argue that countries should be able to impose whatever tariffs they want on imports, for the protection of national industries. There are consumer advocates, like Ralph Nader, who argue that countries should be able to enact whatever environmental, health/safety, and labor regulations they wish. Finally, there are those who argue that the WTO is just a bureaucracy that only operates in the interest of multinational corporations and the wealthiest nations.

The WTO opponents share one interest: sovereignty. The major objection is that countries should be free to determine whatever laws they choose, without outside interference. Since the WTO makes its decisions in secret, and its ministers are not elected, its actions infringe on the rights of people to govern themselves democratically.

What has the WTO done?

The WTO interprets "barriers to trade" extremely broadly. For example, no regulations on the process with which goods are made are allowed. Regulations on the products themselves must be justified if challenged, and there is a high burden of proof on the challenged country to demonstrate that its regulation does not restrict trade. As noted, the burden is high enough that no country has yet met it.

Government purchasing:

But the WTO not only prevents governments from restricting trade among their citizens, it also regulates how governments may spend their own money. The government of Massachusetts decided not to purchase anything from companies which also did business in Burma. Its goal was to put pressure on the Burmese government to respect human rights, as it and other governments had done before to South Africa, over apartheid.

The WTO recently ruled that Massachusetts was restricting international trade by doing this. Now the state was simply spending its own money, not regulating how others would spend their money. Nonetheless, the WTO decided that Massachusetts could not use any such criteria to make its own purchasing decisions. The state is now being sued by the Federal government, to force it to comply with the WTO’s ruling.

A similar case was brought to the WTO against the Federal government itself, over the Helms-Burton Act. The Act required that no Federal agency purchase any goods from companies who did business in Cuba. The Clinton Administration suspended the Act when Congress refused to weaken it.

The important point is that democratically elected governments should be free to spend money in whatever manner they choose – in the same way that people are free to make their own decisions on what products they want to buy, whether their decisions are based on a company’s prices, a company’s human rights record, or the color of the company’s logo.

Health and safety laws:

Europe has banned all beef made from cows that have been treated with artificial growth hormones. Since growth hormones are used primarily in the United States, this is effectively a ban on American beef. Thus, the US has brought a complaint to the WTO.

But the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures explicitly authorizes governments to pass laws restricting trade for the purpose of protecting public health; the only requirement is that there be some scientific basis for the regulations, to ensure that they are not simply used to prevent imports. Yet the WTO struck down the European Union’s ban, claiming that there was no conclusive proof that growth hormones cause illness in humans.

Now the EU had scientific evidence showing that the hormone-treated beef caused disease in high doses, and had therefore cautiously decided to ban the beef altogether (with broad public support for the measure). The WTO decided that Europe should have taken the risk of allowing the beef to be sold and waiting until there were actual health problems before trying to restrict it. The WTO violated its own rules by extending its mandate far enough to question the basis of the law: if the scientific evidence was strong enough for the Europeans to be concerned about their health, what right does anyone else have to second-guess them?

This sets a dangerous precedent. What if the state of Israel decided to demand that all food sold in Israel be kosher? The Jewish religion says that certain practices of preparing foods are unhealthy and therefore forbidden. Should the WTO be able to second-guess the Jewish religion, and prevent Jews from following their religious laws?

Labor vs. Intellectual Property:

We can get a good idea of who is really being served by the WTO when we compare its treatment of labor rights vs. intellectual property rights. While the WTO has long had a strong agreement on intellectual property (TRIPS) which it enforces quite strictly, there is no corresponding agreement on labor rights. WTO advocates claim that labor issues should properly be under the control of the International Labor Organization, a UN group with no enforcement power. However, instead of also putting intellectual property under the control of the World Intellectual Property Organization, another "toothless" UN group, the WTO takes it on itself.

Although "free traders" don’t like to admit it, the right to intellectual property has always been a form of corporate welfare. Patent law was created not because people felt that inventors were "owed" legal monopolies, but rather because politicians thought they could stimulate domestic production by encouraging innovation and creativity. It is only recently that patents turned from corporate welfare to legal rights, and the trend has been to grant patents for things they were never intended for.

Patent law has been an issue recently because of the incredibly high cost of AIDS drugs. Countries like South Africa and India would like to produce their own generic versions more cheaply, but the WTO has ruled that because of the TRIPS agreement, the pharmaceutical companies have exclusive rights to produce the drugs. It is strange that a body supposedly dedicated to free trade enforces these artificial monopolies. Little wonder that poor nations see the WTO as heavily biased in favor of the rich nations.

Contrast this with the treatment of labor. Anyone who dared to call for laborers to have the same rights to the things they produce as corporations have to the things they get patents on would be called a communist. Is there some compelling reason for corporations to have property rights that nobody else does? Hardly; it’s just an example of the WTO’s consistent siding with corporations, rather than with the principles of free markets.

Why fight the WTO?

The principle of sovereignty and self-rule is an important one. It was recognized fifty years ago as essential to peace and good relations between countries. Now it is being eroded on all fronts: the UN is encouraging war against countries that violate human rights; the IMF demands privatization and downsizing in poor and desperate countries; and the WTO refuses to allow countries to establish their own economic and social regulations.

The protesters in Seattle were not Luddites; most of them were not even opposed to free trade on principle. They are, however, opposed to WTO policies which greatly overstep the bounds of any trade agreement. The WTO violates its own rules, and even steps on the principles of free trade, to subvert countries to corporations.

The solution is not to expand the powers of the WTO to include labor rights or environmental agreements, but rather to decrease its powers and prevent it from doing any further harm. The WTO must be legally constrained and publicly accountable, as any governmental organization would be. It must leave countries free to make their own decisions.

When an animal attacks everything in sight and destroys whatever it can, it must either be tamed or put to sleep. We should treat the WTO no differently; it must either be seriously reformed or dismantled entirely.