Free Trade: The Solution To Islamic Terrorism and Extremism

Recent Senate approval of Economic Sanctions Against Iran is another example of democracy using the wrong tools for the job. Economic sanctions will not have the same effect they had on South African Apartheid because free trade is a tenent of Islam.

Sanctions will increase the people of Iran's righteous hatred of America, and strengthen the demagogic regime in Iran. More hatred for America means strengthening the support for leaders, like the current ones, who win elections in a race to the bottom with one hotbutton issue: which candidate hates America more?

Opening trade to the whole Muslim region would be the real solution. At once it would hobble the anti-American demogogic powers in the region, support the people of those nations over the interests of their governments, and lastly, such a move would be part of a real (non-monetary, non-fiscal) solution to the American economic recession.

The Quran itself makes a very clear distinction between infidels who trade with Muslims, and those who refuse. The former are sometimes-friends, the latter, sometimes-enemies. Of course there are greate differences between the Scottish Enlightenment and Islam; nevertheless, numerous passages in the Quran have a striking resemblance to the verbiage of Adam Smith and John Locke in their radical support the natural laws surrounding commercial property and trade. In the linked article, a number of other authoritative Islamic scholars describe the free market in an Islamic context: Islam: A Free Market Religion

And not only are the elected powerful kept in power, but Iran, like any country still developing its property laws still has a somewhat oligarchical ring of families that control the vast majority of wealth, many of them having to do with natural gas and gasoline. These two points the senate singles out for direct economic sanctioning. If we hinder trade on those two points, it is simply the external equivalent of an import tariff, and, as happens with any import tariff or export subsidy, it has the effect of exploiting the people of the country more efficiently to the power of the titans of the industry involved. Moreover, those families are given incentives to support those demagogic regimes and force those regimes to grant more public money into infrastructure for the development of those elite controlled industries. For American audiences, these economic exploitative moves are not unlike the recent hike in steel tariffs and concurrent increase in federal public works under the present US administration, or in another way bank bailouts.

Economic sanctions, perhaps most often compared to those against South African Apartheid, cannot work on Muslim nations and will only serve as a paving stone the road to war and serfdom.