Free-trade and Transfer of wealth: Nobody engages in a trade for its own sake. Trade is done for acquiring gains, profits and wealth. And for that matter, all economic activities are done for some personal gains - in the short term or in the long term. Trade-based economic model is based on maximization of prosperity/profits, division of labor and exploitation of nature and fellow-man. Each person, under the system, tries to maximize his or her gains at the expense of another person in any trade transaction. The system, as a whole, tries to maximize the division of labor, division of knowledge and division of ownership in order to empower the system itself. The system also promotes the maximum inter- dependencies among individuals, families, communities and eventually among nations for even basic needs so as to make them totally dependent on the system itself. The system also promote commercialization of nature and its efficient and speedy and mass exploitation and depletion. Trade based economic model is totally opposite of an economic model based on the self-sufficiency, indivisibility of labor and milking of nature. I will call this model a classical model for the sake of providing contrast to the trade-based modern model. The prosperity of a collective, division of labor-knowledge- ownership and depletion of nature are the pillars on which trade-based economic model operates. Notice that all of its foundations are expansionist. There is no set definition of prosperity. It is elastic and insatiable. If the definition of prosperity gets to be driven by the expansionist greed and hedonism, there is nothing built into the system to check it. Greed for the sake of greed, greed for the sake of power, prosperity for the sake of prosperity are dehumanizing and enslaving stages and they are easily able to piggy back on the trade-based model. Thus, prosperity driven model can not put breaks on the trade-based model like model based on self-sufficiency can. Model based on self-sufficiency is checked from unlimited expansion by the limited resources and energies that individuals or families can harness on their own. Thus greed and hedonism can not ride on such economic model as they can on the trade-based model. Secondly, trade-based model seeks prosperity of the collective. There is not set definition of the collective. The model starts out with maximizing the prosperity of the family but it does not stop there. The collective for which prosperity is sought progressively enlarge to cover community, a province, a region, a nation, a continent, a racial group, a culture, a religious or cultural group or their alliances, a whole empire, whole globe. Thus both pursuit of prosperity and the collective for which wealth and prosperity are sought are very elastic and expansionist. Therefore, they can not provide any checks to the trade- based model as to when to say enough is enough and when to contain itself. Similarly, principle of division is also expansionist. Trade-based model starts out with division of labor, but it also progressively carries out division of knowledge and division of ownership/property rights. It creates even finer and finer divisions of them and progressively make the individual, and than family, and than community, and than province, and than nation and than continents totally marginal, dependent, interchangeable and inconsequential in the trade order presided over and controlled by a handful of entities. All decentralized self-sufficiencies in the sphere of knowledge, ownership, wealth are lost for ever and they are made totally dependant on mercy of the trade order for survival. The classical model that stresses self-sufficiency and indivisibility of labor, family is made self-sufficient, than village, than community and than province and than nation and than the continent and than the world. And as each level acquire self-sufficiencies, they are freed up to pursue non-economic pursuits, acquire independence, freedom and autonomy from each other, and allowed to work as sovereign and autonomous entities. Thirdly, nature is depleted and destroyed under the trade- based order. Here again, Trade-based order can not stop with just milking the nature, it must eat the whole beef. Economic prosperity, employment etc come to depend on continuous depletion of nature. If the rate at which nature is consumed is greater than the ability of nature to replenish itself, nature gets depleted and eventually destroyed for good. If something takes 100 years for the nature to replenish and if you consume it all in split- minute, than it amounts to depletion of nature. If you deplete it at such a faster rate that nature gets exhausted before nature is in position to replenish it, than you are destroying nature. Trade-based economic model brings in such stages and consequences upon the earth. However, in the interim stages, since nature is vast, its variety is so vast, the phenomenal rate of depletion is not all that visible in the short-run. So vastness and variety of nature provides elasticity to the trade-based order in stead of putting any checks on it. Trade-based model constantly seeks out greener pastures to tap untapped nature and resources. Thus, trade-based economics does not produce prosperity, wealth or nature, it merely redistributes and consumes the prosperity, wealth and nature. The entire foundation of this model is expansionist. Since it is consumption-oriented, it constantly has to expand commercialization, add new markets and exploit new frontiers even to maintain its current prosperity. When trade-order saturate a given community or province, it seeks to engulf the whole nation within its order. When a given nation get saturated and provide no more expansionist potential, it seeks to engulf neighboring nations, hemispheres, continents and ultimately the whole globe. Thus, trade-based economic order end in global pyramid. Trade-based model, when confined to a national base of operation, creates classes within the nation. When all people compete to maximize there gains, there will always be some who will succeed more than others and some will get exploited more than others. And remember that trade-based order do not produce any new wealth, it merely transforms, packages the existing wealth and transfers the wealth, from one individual to another, one family to another, from nature to a factory, from factory to another factory, from factory to individuals. Thus wealth is transferred endlessly among people and at any moment, some will have more of it than others. Thus, such trade-based order create classes, haves and have-nots at national level. However, if the national economy is able to absorb the economies of other nations through trade, than the distribution of the classes and have-nots gets spread out across the spectrum of the trade-zone which now spans across the several nations, and the stronger nation can arrange the polity and economic relationships in such a way that the have-nots and lower-classes produced by the trade-based model are concentrated only beyond its national borders. This is possible because trade acquires wealth and consumerism spends wealth. Whoever conducts the trade and provide goods and services acquire wealth and whoever merely provides labor and consumption of goods spends and transfers the wealth. Nation providing goods and services procure wealth from other nations and nation providing merely labor and markets merely spend its wealth and transfer to its trading partner. Thus, global trade order globalizes the classes and have- nots. It produces first-world, middle-world and third-world. Nations who are politically strong and who have mastered the trade-order can export its lower-classes and haves-not conditions to the weaker nations while strengthening its prosperity by wealth-transfer from all over the world. Free- flow of goods and services and money and ownerships facilitate flow of wealth to the top and flow of misery to the bottom. Trickle-down theory in national level operation make rich richer and poor poorer and poor people at the mercy of trickle down effect. Globalization of this theory is allowed by globalization of trade which makes rich nations richer and poor nations poorer. Rich nations entice the poor nations with novelty of consumerism and increased standard of living to give up their economic sovereignty and join the global trade regime but international consumerism only deplete even whatever wealth such poor nations have managed to have. Consumerism is nothing but expenditure of wealth in exchange for life-style. When consumerism is confined within a nation, there is wealth transfer among people but nations as a whole does not loose wealth. But internationalized consumerism transfers wealth from consumer to the producer across national borders. Some nations acquire wealth and some nations lose it. Even the new employment gains by international trade are short-lived. These gains are spent right back on giving greater boost to consumerism. As long as a nation has the wealth to transfer, employments, consumerism and traders remain vibrant in the nation. After that, the real exploitation, dehumanization, colonialism and enslavement begin. So consumerism, imported life-styles and employments can not be considered signs of national progress. It is a sign of degeneration and eventual fall of nation. This is true for all nations that would be at the bottom of the global pyramid. Trade is such an expansionist thing, that it constantly expands its domain. It commercializes every aspect of human life, human relationships, human values, human needs. It also depletes nature, commercializes nature, privatizes nature, destroys nature. Land, water, air and some of the natural gifts that man absolutely can not live without become commercialized. A free-trade where nothing is free and everything has a cost and a price! It establishes supremacy of capitalism over humanity, nations, nature and even culture. Expansionist commercialism even subjects culture to commercial values. Cultural products and political ideas become goods and services and they are subjected to free-trade. Thus cultural invasion, political invasion become inseparable from free-trade. Films, movies, TV, magazines, books, newspapers, educational curricula etc reflect not only commercial ventures but also they are also part and parcel of cultural and political values too. Thus economic invasion become inseparable from cultural and political invasion. Take over of national economy through trade domination become inseparable from cultural and political take over of the nation and subjugation of the native models. Thus, economic take over expand to become take over of cultural and political sovereignties. This is true for nations who are at the bottom of the global pyramid created by the trade-based model. In trade-based model, everything is sough to be globalized and their free-flow is sought except people as if people do not represent knowledge, skills, labor, resource, services. People can not move about freely to maximize their gains. Only capital, wealth and goods and services, corporations etc allowed the free-flow that transcend national boundaries. Even if free-trade regime destroy the nation- state and sovereignties of poor nations, it has to be imposed on all. But since free-flow of people from poor to the rich nations can hamper the nation-state and world-state sovereignties of the rich nations, it is ruthlessly objected by the free-traders. Instead of people moving to the rich nations and disrupting them, free-traders make the reverse case of rich nations taking their operations to the poor nations to disrupt them. Thus, free-trade is a demonic, self-serving and inhumane concept. There is not greater organized evil than free-trade. In a classical model which is an antithesis of trade-based model, emphasis is on giving economic self-sufficiency and consequent economic sovereignty to families, communities, provinces and nations. Here trade is also used for reinforcing and supplementing the economic self-sufficiency. But it is used as a peripheral and complimentary measure and not as the central part of the economic model. Plus trade has to be subjected to checks and balances so that its expansionist traits are inhibited and subdued. World knows it only too well that most of the dehumanizations and slavery of entire class and race of people have come through the route of traders. Man is more than economic animal. The goal of any economic model has to be to ensure economic well-being of the society and make it so effortless that people are able to pursue other non-economic and loftier pursuits in life. Expansionist economic models entangle humanity in never-ending and ever-expanding economic pursuits and consume the humanity. People end up spending their entire life in preparing for economic life and pursuit of economic life and even at the end of such hectic life, the sum total of their wealth barely cover their old-age. Sum total of their economic activity at the fag end of their life turns out to be a big zero and so is the sum total of their non-economic pursuits. They have nothing to pass it on to the next generation who must start from big zero-line and repeat the cycle all over again. This is the complete dehumanization and devaluation of life and humanity. Under trade-based economic model, nobody is a winner. By Manmohan Sinha Sept,1994