We need to make free trade a human right.

To my fellow Canadians, and to our friends in the United States and Mexico: I write to ask you to join #FreeMyTrade! — a new effort to rescue all of us, and all citizens of the world, from the incoherent menace known as the NAFTA talks and from the endless tyrannies of the regulated global trading system.

Have you had enough of the near hourly reports on the status of trade negotiations? Are you fed up with prime ministers, presidents and other pontificating politicians on all sides delivering warnings, threats and positions on milk supply, cultural industries, auto trade, digital trade, trade imbalances, wage rates, tariffs, quotas, customs duties, labour conditions, rules of origin, social issues, investment rules, dispute settlements?

Then join #FreeMyTrade!

The prime objective of this overdue movement is to take trade out of the hands of politicians, economists, lawyers, bureaucrats, media commentators, union leaders and wonks who in effect make a living preventing all of us — as individuals — from enjoying our fundamental right to free exchange.

We should, instead, embed the right to free trade in our constitutions, our charters of freedom and in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.

The starting point for understanding the right to free trade can be found in the foundational ideas of two Enlightenment thinkers, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As Smith explained in 1776, individuals do not make at home what costs less to buy from someone else. The same applies to trade that happens to flow between nations. “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it from them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage.”

If there’s a problem with this simple summary of Smith’s argument, it is the implication that nations produce and supply goods and services. They do not. Nations do nothing. It is the individuals within a nation, acting as individuals or in association with others via corporations or other organizing structures, who are the engines of production, consumption and trade.

Exceptions can be made for national defence purposes, but we are the producers. And we are the consumers. Nations — governments, politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, corporate protectionists, unions — have no right to any part of the general trade equation. As individual consumers and producers, we should hold the right to buy and sell our goods and services on our own terms — whether those transactions involve people across the street, in another province or state, or in another country.

We don’t need trade agreements telling us what we can and cannot buy and sell, in what quantity and at what price. And none of us should be subject to the impositions of the trade regimentalists who are constantly subverting our rights.

As Canadians, for example, we have a right to buy French brie and Italian parmesan free of the quotas and markups embedded in our trade protectionist system. We should not tolerate insulting grocery store labels that offer “Swiss Emmental” cheese that’s made in Canada behind a tariff wall that keeps out Emmental actually fermented in Switzerland.

Under the right to free trade, individual consumers should make the decisions on electronic goods from China, clothing from Vietman, shoes from Italy. We the consumers should control the cars we buy — whether made in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Germany or South Korea. It’s our economic right, and not the right of a politician or an automobile executive or some union leader to decide how much foreign content auto products should contain, or what automotive wage rates should be. Trade deal makers should have no right to impose tariffs and quotas that raise consumer prices and reduce supply.

Economist Bo Sodersten summarized trade as a human right thusly, “For Smith, as for Ricardo, the supreme subject of economics was the consumer. Man laboured and produced in order to consume.” The objective of trade was to increase “the sum of enjoyments.”

Since the 1950s, global trade has soared from 20 per cent of world GDP to 60 per cent, the result of allowing consumers everywhere the benefits of expanding trade freedom, dramatically raising living standards and the sum of enjoyments. We need more.

The UN Human Rights Declaration states that all human beings are “born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Everyone, it adds in Article 3, has a “right to life, liberty and security of person.”

No right captures the spirit of brotherhood more than the exercise of free exchange and trade. We need a new addition to the declaration, Article 3a: “Everyone has the right to free trade.”

Join #FreeMyTrade today.