Free Trade Essay

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Using consumer commodity fetishism, free trade has greatly contributed to the society of perpetual growth by increasing the amount money added to the local economy and offers to consumers many competitive and low prices for commodities. The free trade market has had great success in the capitalist economy due to the transformation of the consumer and the new cultural expectation for consumers to accumulate wealth. In capitalism people aim to produce goods for the purpose of exchange for more capital or money. Robbins states that the economics of capitalism grew out of interactions of five different items: commodities, money, labor power, means of production and production (2013, pg. 36). It is the manipulation of these items in the free trade market that has allowed free trades objectives of economic growth, access to high quality low priced goods, competitive markets, increased amount …show more content…

The success and growth of fair trade is heavily tied to consumers and them being aware how goods are produced. In an opposing way to free trades masking of production in the black box, fair trade aims to educates consumers. This education of consumers is the result of “fighting commodity fetishism by creating greater transparency between the grower and the end consumer” (Topik, 2007, pg. 146). Fair Trade thrives off of the transparency of the production of goods. Consumers can pressure sellers to provide fair-trade products in markets who in turn encourage the producers to participate in fair trade by buying fair trade products from them. The objectives of free trade are distinctly different from those of fair trade. As much as fair trade is not a displacement for free trade, its aims are directly opposed to that of free trade and that is a contributing factor as to why the fair trade movement is slow to

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