Michael Hurd provides an excellent example at the difficulties that exist when trying to debate extremist Objectivists. In an article for Capitalism Magazine, Hurd argued that it is wrong for Americans to trade with Cuba and China for a number of reasons. I don’t happen to agree with Hurd on this matter, and he’s got a message for those people like me who see nothing wrong with trading with China,
If you enjoy freedom, and you actually want to assist and trade with a country who is known to be a military threat to your freedom, then something is morally and psychologically wrong with you. Quite frankly, if people in a free country abandon rational principles in favor of shorter term gains, then they deserve whatever the consequences may be. Free people remain free only so long as they grasp the principles upon which freedom depends.
Fortunately, from where I’m sitting it is Hurd who is clueless about principles.
It is more than a bit difficult to understand how either China or Cuba could be considered serious military threats to the United States. With Cuba, the United States military could squash that country like a bug if it felt like it. Cuba ceased to be a threat to American security after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
China possess nuclear weapons and so could potentially be a military threat, but the main foreign policy dustups between China and the United States occur largely over the respective role that each country will have within Asia. China doesn’t seem to have any interest in conquering America, even if it does have an interest in regaining control over Taiwan.
More importantly, though, Hurd provides an extremely one side case against free trade, committing facts that get in the way of his argument. One the one hand, it is not clear that blockades and the like are all that effective. The American embargo against Cuba has certainly caused economic hardships for Cuba (though most of that country’s problems are caused by its socialist economic policies), but done little to loosen Castro’s grip. Similarly, Hurd doesn’t bother to mention another “military threat” to the United States, Iraq, where another embargo has been in place for years and again has done little to foster liberalization of a dictatorial military regime.
Meanwhile trade between the United States and China has accomplished much the same thing that trade between the United States and the Soviet Union did — empowered dissidents and anti-government activists. In China, there are a growing number of dissidents who use Western technologies to distribute their anti-government message. This also happens to some extent in Cuba, but thanks in part to the US embargo, far fewer people have access to computers and the Internet within Cuba than in China.
I think the facts speak for themselves: Hurd is wrong. Trade between free and unfree nations promotes peace and undermines autocratic governments. And the only psychological and moral problems reside with those Objectivists who resort to such absurd claims about their opponents.
Source:
Free trade with a slave state?. Michael J. Hurd, Capitalism Magazine, June 16, 2001.