How much sovereignty, really, do Canada and Mexico have versus the United States, whose market they need? Mexico tried for 175 years to steer a course not just totally independent of but actually hostile to and contemptuous of the United States, but failed miserably. That policy drove its economy into the ground and produced general poverty, disaffection, and mass emigration to the 'hated enemy', Gringoland.
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Canada went a similar route, from "No truck nor trade with the Yankees" in 1911 to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1988, a span of 77 years, then on to NAFTA, which added Mexico to the mix, in 1994. NAFTA is a pale imitation of the various treaties and amendments that have, since 1957, turned the Common Market into the European Union. Unlike the EU, NAFTA accords no right of freedom of movement of persons past borders; has no common currency (in even part of the union area); and permits each member country full sovereignty over everything, from foreign policy, to weights-and-measures, and standards as regards labor, environment, and every other issue. Each NAFTA country can as a practical matter actually refuse full free trade by blocking imports on the objection that "dumping" or 'impermissible government subsidy' is at issue.
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There have been proposals to enlarge NAFTA to include, for instance, all the countries of the Western Hemisphere and even Britain, but no progress has been made in that direction. Instead, the U.S. and each other NAFTA country have negotiated separate free-trade agreements with a number of countries, which would have to be abrogated if there were to be a customs union in the NAFTA area. Did you know that the U.S. concluded a free-trade agreement with Australia, effective January 2005? I didn't, until I started doing some research for this blog entry.
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Despite the violation of national sovereignties that protestors assert, Americans can't just up and move to Mexico and compete with Mexicans for jobs, nor to Canada, nor to Australia, to compete with locals for jobs, and those countries' nationals can't move past our borders freely either.
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All of this free-trade talk is just "reinventing the wheel", except that the new wheel these proposals would create is polygonal, not round. Depending upon the number of sides and the composition of the tire of this new polygonal wheel, it would give us anywhere from mildly bumpy fluidity of movement to a jolting, jangly ride like the bucking of a Brahma bull.
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The free-trade 'wheel' created in 1787 among the original Thirteen States created a complete common market, customs union, and currency union, with free movement of labor and capital. That free market is why the United States became a superpower. The way to achieve the benefits of that kind of free-trade area more widely is simply to enlarge it by admitting new States to the Union, as for instance 7 new states from Canada, 10 or so from Mexico, 5 or so from Australia, 6 from Britain, etc., across the range of geographic areas that could usefully join together with far less chaotic disruption than manifest benefit.
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I don't approve of giving away access to our irreplaceable market without any political price to be paid by the recipients of an ill-considered, indeed weak-minded and self-destructive American generosity. We created this huge internal market by sacrificing each of our states' sovereignty. 'New' states, those not among the original Thirteen, didn't really have any sovereignty to surrender, except for Texas, which was independent (of Mexico) for almost 10 years, and Hawaii, which was independent for hundreds of years. Still, each state did give up all claims to the right of independent sovereignty when it became a State.
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That is the way the United States should proceed in the world, not as just one of 193 separate and legalistically 'equal' countries, but as the center of a pre-planetary cloud of gas and granules that in time, with mutual attraction, will form a new (and improved) planet.
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P.S.1 AOL has just redesigned its "Welcome" area, with a ridiculous result. When you minimize the Welcome screen, a list of available subject-matter areas appears in reduced form on the left side of the screen. "News", which was always part of that list, is no longer there! There may, nowadays, be no way to complain to AOL about anything, as to alert them to that ill-advised change or moronic oversight. You used to be able to email "SteveCase" and someone within AOL would read what you had to say. I just tried that about this issue. I did not get a "no such active member" error message. Maybe it went thru, to someone. If not, complaining aloud here is the only way I know to vent.
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P.S.2 Nick@Nite is inflicting yet another week of a Fresh Prince of Bel Air marathon upon its viewers. The programmers of Viacom's Nickelodeon and TV Land units need to be lashed to a post and flogged within an inch of their lives. They HATE their audience, and hold them in extreme contempt. They show some of the SAME episodes not just twice in a single nite of the preposterous weeklong summer marathons we are now subjected to but also the following nite at least once as well! They also show the exact same movie on the TV Land movie nite, Friday, two weeks in a row. They think that their entire audience is mental-defective losers who will watch anything put in front of them, because they're idiots. The programmers hate those (presumed) idiots, and show their contempt for them by repeating the same shows over and over endlessly. Fresh Prince, one of the worst shows in all of television history if not the very worst, is shown by Nickelodeon a bedrock minimum of 2,500 times a year. Those episodes are, of course, ALL repeats. Not a single one is new. But Viacom's programmers are confident that the viewers of Nickelodeon and TV Land are such morons that they won't ever object. To make sure they CAN'T object without going to more trouble than most people are willing to go to nowadays, they REFUSE to permit email to programming or corporate executives from the website of each service, and even hide the snailmail addresses both for each separate service and for Viacom overall, in order to prevent viewers from complaining. That is the kind of thing that got Marie Antoinette's head chopped off. Maybe we need to roll Sumner Redstone, 'head' of Viacom, to a guillotine in a wood-wheeled cart, to end this abuse. I'm all for it. Anybody got a cart we can borrow? And a guillotine?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,707 — for Israel.)