Graham built a successful legal career in international law and, despite his conservative roots and inherited wealth, became a Liberal in politics. He also learned French (in the early '60s, before it was fashionable for Anglo-Canadians) and he notes repeatedly how much bilingualism advanced his sense of the world as well as his business and political careers.
I don't want to review the whole book or the whole life (he insists he is not a historian and the book is a memoir not a history). So just a couple of historically-oriented thoughts, maybe in a couple of posts. First, Graham's recollection of his 1960s involvement with tariffs -- an issue he probably thought dead and gone when he wrote this memoir.
For a business lawyer then, "international law" -- still an embryonic field when Graham got into it -- mostly meant trade law. The sixties saw the ending of the post-Second World War GATT moment, when an international effort coordinated by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade succeeded in reducing the massive tariffs that had been standard in national economies worldwide for centuries -- both for government revenue and for protectionism.
"The more tariffs were reduced, the more important the non-tariff barriers became," Graham writes. As typical tariffs in much of the world began to approach zero, the GATT morphed into the World Trade Organization. By the 1980s the WTO meant global standardization, broad and binding international trade rules, and more emphasis on regulation (read: reduction) of non-tariff practices that complicated or reduced trade among nations.
Graham, like many trade experts, hoped the WTO would become in practice as well as theory an authoritative independent international court to ensure the fairness of global free trade rules.
Well it did not happen that way. But Graham's few pages on his GATT and WTO activities got me thinking about one of the great unexplained puzzles of our era: the epochal change that occurred in the 1980s -- the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, more or less. I don't know of a big authoritative interpretation of the roots of that 00 but it's not really my field (except that I live in it like everyone.)
How did the postwar consensus on progressive taxation, growing governments, strong unions, and movement toward economic equality and social justice shift into an endless preoccupation with reducing taxes, shrinking (and disparaging) government, breaking unions, increasing inequality and promoting "anti-woke" hysteria?
"Non-tariff barriers," broadly speaking, is code for government regulation. Did the global approval given to a war against non-tariff trade barriers become the doorway for the business world's adoption of an unrelenting war on all forms of regulation, and on all government as basically "bureaucracy," or "red tape" or "taxing and spending" -- worth doing away with as much as possible.
When we in Canada read of the reduction in "interprovincial trade barriers" could be worth "$250 billion!" we need to understand that would virtually require the abolition of all the Canadian provinces, since regulation is one of the main things they exist to maintain. It gets promoted as support for craft beer and local wineries, but those ain't the real target at all.
Graham on free trade in a post to follow.
