Map Ed Note: This column neatly ties the free trade debate to US drug policies

FREE TRADE? NOT FOR THE UNITED STATES

Dec. 5 - SALIDA - To some degree, the United States of America was
formed by a violent protest to a trade issue. By 1773, in the
aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the British Parliament had decreed
that certain of his majesty's North American colonies should shoulder
their fair share of the expense of maintaining a standing army to
protect that portion of the empire from France, Spain and a variety of
Indians.

His majesty's subjects had not been consulted about these taxes, among
them a levy on tea. Many of them quietly protested by either
boycotting or smuggling, but others wanted to make a more dramatic
statement. Disguising themselves as Indians on the night of Dec. 16,
1773, they boarded a vessel in Boston Harbor, smashed the tea chests
and tossed it all into the water.

The local authorities, perhaps because they feared retaliation from
these terrorists, refused to help the British find the vandals. In
London, Parliament reacted with punitive laws, known as the
Intolerable Acts on this side of the Atlantic, designed to force the
Boston hooligans to make restitution for the tea - the private
property of the East India Company - that they had destroyed.

Instead, they went to war, and there's even a Colorado connection,
although it cannot be documented because the tea-dumpers were never
identified. But according to family tradition, one Silas Bent was
among them, and the records do show that Silas joined the minutemen in
1775 and fought the British through the Revolutionary War.

His grandsons, Charles and William, built Bent's Fort, and engaged in
international trade among the United States, Mexico (the Arkansas
River was the boundary then) and the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Much of the Bent trade was in bison hides, which had superseded beaver
pelts after European fashion preferences moved from felt to silk.

The point of this excursion into our history? Even in a landlocked
desert like Colorado, international trade has been a major economic
factor for at least two centuries, and even if we'd like to ignore it,
we can't. Over the years, major Colorado industries like sugar beets
and silver mining have waxed and waned with the twists and turns of
international trade.

That may lie at the heart of the protests against the World Trade
Organization meeting in Seattle - the feeling that we're losing
control of our own economic destinies in the face of
"globalization."

That is, we might like to make moral decisions with our purchases, and
eschew products made by slave labor or child labor. We might wish to
boycott exports from politically incorrect countries, or forbid
selling commodities that result from processes we find environmentally
objectionable.

And then there's the shadowy WTO, operating in secrecy, issuing
decrees that might supersede the expressed will of the public.

Even without the WTO, this is an issue in Massachusetts. A state
purchasing law attaches a 10-percent penalty to any bid from any
company that does business with the repressive regime of Myanmar (the
country formerly known as Burma).

The state has been sued by an industry group, the National Foreign
Trade Council on the grounds that trade policy should be made in
Washington, not Boston.

If the global industrialists prevail, then it means that the people of
Massachusetts cannot, by acting through their legislature, determine
how their money will be spent. If that's democratic, then so was the
tea tax in 1773.

There's also more than a whiff of hypocrisy from most free-traders.
They say they want open markets and open borders, but note that there
are people in Colombia who grow and process a certain crop. There are
also people in America who want to buy that product, just as there are
Americans who desire to purchase agricultural products from
Afghanistan and Mexico.

So do we read the Wall Street Journal denouncing these artificial
barriers to global prosperity that deprive poverty-stricken farmers in
developing countries of access to profitable markets that could lift
their standard of living? Has any Republican taken to the House or
Senate floor to demand that free trade be extended from auto parts and
computer components?

Of course not. The same free-traders who tell us that it's none of our
business how many turtles get killed in the process of catching tuna
also support the War on Drugs - another application of someone's moral
notions to the marketplace.

Given all that, I don't think there is any such thing as free trade,
nor is there likely to be. The only question is who profits from the
restraints of trade, not whether there should be restraints.

Ed Quillen of Salida (cozine@chaffee.net) is a former newspaper editor
whose column appears Tuesdays and Sundays.