Medary.com

Doom, despair, the Fourth Turning . . .

Reuters reports:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Global free trade talks, billed as a once in a generation chance to boost growth and ease poverty, collapsed on Monday after nearly five years of haggling and resuming them could take years.

The suspension of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha round came after major trading powers failed in a last-ditch bid to overcome differences on reforming world farm trade, which lies at the heart of the round.

"The WTO negotiations are suspended," Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath told journalists. When asked how long the suspension could last, he replied: "Anywhere from months to years."

The round, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, stumbled from the start over how far rich nations would go to dismantle their huge farm subsidies and open up their markets.

Yep, that's right.  It fell apart because of subsidies to rich-country farmers.  Why do rich-country farmers need subsidies?  Why do any small businesses need subsidies?  Why do any businesses of any size need subsidies?

Protectionism never works, in the long run.

The upshot is that protectionism is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, destructive of all economic prosperity. We are not, if we were ever, a world of self-sufficient farmers. The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or it is best at, most relatively efficient in, and exchanges that product for the goods and services of others. Without the division of labor and the trade based upon that division, the entire world would starve. Coerced restraints on trade--such as protectionism--cripple, hobble, and destroy trade, the source of life and prosperity. Protectionism is simply a plea that consumers, as well as general prosperity, be hurt so as to confer permanent special privilege upon groups of less efficient producers, at the expense of more competent firms and of consumers. But it is a peculiarly destructive kind of bailout, because it permanently shackles trade under the cloak of patriotism.

(emphasis added)