Monday, May 30, 2022

Mises Wire

Mises Wire

The Hydra-Headed Model of Social Change

Posted: 30 May 2022 09:00 AM PDT

Many people want to change the world. Depending on the direction they would like to go in, they need to select a suitable strategy.

Speaking for myself, my desired change is to return to a free market in money and credit. So, I founded Monetary Metals, to make it profitable to invest in the gold standard. We provide capital to productive businesses and pay savers gold interest on their gold. We make money while helping the world. The strategy depends on a voluntary choice by all participants, which they make because of their self-interest.

However, many want a different kind of change. Not a system that benefits everyone, but free goodies and the power to dispense them. In other words, a flavor of socialism.

In order for Joe to get something for nothing, then Mary must get nothing for something. Obviously, Mary will not volunteer for the role of sacrificial animal. Therefore, the aspiring socialist cannot start a business that makes money by accomplishing this kind of change. There is no equivalent of a Monetary Metals for a socialist cause.

The truth needs to be said only once, but a lie must be stated and restated endlessly to reinforce it. The same is true for an unjust and dishonest policy. A socialist policy needs a diverse group of promoters, to sell it and the lies on which it is based.

Let's look at modern monetary theory (MMT) as a case study. MMT is based on some frivolous assertions. I will shine some sunlight on them, but my focus here is not on debunking MMT. It is to look at the social movement that sprung up around MMT.

Socialist ideas are not new. Indeed, the world does not want to go back to Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Adolf Hitler. Or the twentieth-century economist whose book was praised by Mussolini, as a "useful introduction to fascist economics": John Maynard Keynes.1

At least not under those banners. If a socialist policy is to gain traction today, in America, it has to be given fresh new branding.

Step one is therefore a seminal paper, authored by someone of sufficient gravitas to get away with it. It could be a well-positioned professor emeritus. In the case of MMT, it is successful businessman and elder statesman, Warren Mosler. The paper plus the body of work that builds on it, serves as the base of the platform for a new, revitalized socialist social movement.

The seminal MMT paper is "Soft Currency Economics" by Warren Mosler, in 1994 whose foundations are built upon a swamp of debunked ideas.

But this article is not about debunking magical thinking or bad economics but how a movement forms around a socialist idea like MMT. Step one is to have a Noted Person, with sufficient gravitas, write the seminal paper. Step two is when other academics create an aura of respectability around it.

So far in the process, the idea is not understandable by the voters. And hence, it is not of interest to the media.

They need to go to step three, to form a cadre of court economists. These are soldiers for the movement, and their job is to sell the propaganda—not to the public—but to those who influence the public. In war, real soldiers are willing to sacrifice their lives for their country. In socialist propagation, the ideological soldiers are willing to sacrifice their reputations for their agenda.

Most court economists don't have the eminence of the elder statesman. So, even if they could devise new arguments, they would be called out for it. However, the movement does not need original thinkers at this phase. It just needs more promoters. And there are lots of willing hacks.

The seminal paper has to offer at least a façade of intellectual rigor. The academic followers rigorously refer to that paper and the body of work they create around it.

The court economists generally pay lip service to this material. But, in step four, the popularizers come on board the movement. The popularizers are talking heads, celebrities, politicians, etc. And they are freed from any such constraints. Indeed, the cash value of something like MMT is that it gives them carte blanche to indulge their worst policy fantasies, such as the Green New Deal.

The popularizers cash in on their association with a darling theory, whose packaging is emblazoned with a starburst saying "New!" Just taking the Green New Deal as an example, is it really a new idea to subsidize companies who cannot make a profit?

As a social movement, the MMTers commit a kind of informal logical fallacy. They can promise a seemingly magical benefit such as unlimited energy from unreliable wind power. Their theory gives it the credibility of science, if you don't examine it too closely.

And when things don't work out, the theory—and therefore the movement—gets immunity from the backlash. The academics can just say that the academic MMT literature does not propose these policies.

That may be true, but it's extremely disingenuous. As a movement, MMTers are arguing exactly this. The MMT upper echelon—the elder statesman himself, the professoriate, and the cadre of court economists—are aggressively indifferent when the popularizers are out there publicly promising magical benefits.

Those who fight MMT policies in the political trenches may find that they are fighting a Hydra. They can cut off a head, but then two more spring into the battle.

For example, they may say that the MMT policy of printing trillions in the wake of Covid has led to inflation. Then, the MMT upper echelon retorts that the present administration is not an adherent of MMT. And besides, they claim that MMT is a theory, not a policy prescription!

The MMT academics provide intellectual cover for the MMT popularizers, with their eminent reputations. And the MMT popularizers give cover to the academics, by their apparent separation from said academics. It is the division of labor, applied to a socialist social movement. It is like organized crime, when the police arrest the soldiers, and the head of the organization is safe.

Whenever Senator Elizabeth Warren or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez need to gussy up their vacuous ideas and destructive policies, they will trot out MMT and an MMT court economist. They can count on the MMT upper echelon not to object. No, these eminences will reserve their protestations, for when the predictable consequences come, and people direct their ire at MMT.

"Oh, no, MMT isn't about that."

  • 1. James Strachey Barnes, Universal Aspects of Fascism, Williams and Norgate, London: UK, 1929, pp. 113-114

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Covid and Its Statist Legacy: How Did We Get to This Point?

Posted: 30 May 2022 04:00 AM PDT

A plague unlike any other in modern years appeared on our shore as early as 2019, but it wasn't until the start of February 2020 that the world began seeing massive surges in cases. Banking on the premature experiment in China, which implemented full-scale lockdowns dispensing with civil liberties in order to lower the transmission and mortality rate, the US and other countries around the world started implementing full-scale lockdowns which resulted in more than 3.9 billion people, or half of the world's population, being told by their governments to stay home.

Various studies have now shown that public policy measures such as compulsory and enforced lockdowns have systematically failed to improve mortality rates due to covid. One of the premier studies is from Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics titled "Literature Review and Meta-analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality," which found that lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced covid-19 deaths by 0.2 percent.

At the same time, these very lockdowns and other stringent measures exacerbated economic ills and have led to one of the worst periods in modern economic history, with slow growth, and with inflation shooting through the roof, hitting 8.5% in March. It thus becomes vital, amidst calls for a great reset, to examine how we got where we are.

Lockdowns and Cancelling Production

The economy is a huge chain of division of labor, interlocked to such an extent that there are no single individuals or firms which produce the whole of any given product alone. In a world where the producer of any single good relies on many precursor inputs, the consistent flow of goods and services becomes indispensable to sustaining and reproducing the structure of economic activity.

It was therefore clear what the lockdowns and cancelation of economic activities were going to lead to. Goods and services in the marketplace are not homogenous in nature and do not perform the same role in the economy. Consumer goods are directly consumed by the consumers, and therefore do not lead to the downstream effects that capital or producer goods cause. When a consumer good becomes scarce on the market, the resulting change in price will not directly lead to changes in the prices of other consumer goods. But when a producer good such as iron (or oil or nickel) becomes scarce, the change in the price of iron leads to changes in the prices of many other goods, because iron is used by many other producers as an input for their goods. Thus an underlying change in the price of iron will lead to changes in the prices of all those goods which use iron due to its increasing cost.

When the covid pandemic began, some economists predicted a total collapse in consumer spending. Based on the idea of the "paradox of thrift" (an increase in savings causes a reduction in the spending that the economy depends on), those economists advised governments to hand huge monetary help to consumers. The consumer thus had more money at his disposal than he had previously, or would have had if he lost his business or his job without this government support.

This additional consumer income was spent by consumers on increasing their consumption, which actually increased during lockdowns, while the flow of output decreased due to the lockdowns. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when the pandemic began, consumer spending in the second quarter of 2020 had fallen and was down 9.8 percent from the same period in 2019. One year later, however, consumer expenditures were 15.7 percent higher than a year earlier. Consumer expenditures in the first and second quarters of 2021 were even higher than in the first quarter of 2020, which was largely unaffected by the pandemic because it began late in the first quarter.

As consumer goods producers ramped up production to meet this demand, this led to increasing demand for the inputs that those companies use. But the producers of these inputs did not see any reason to increase their production level and capacity from previous periods, since the increasing levels of consumer demand would have been impossible without the government's monetary intervention, and were thus at best temporary. This shortfall in output produced as well as supplied to the market was further exaggerated by the manufacturer shutdowns. Capacity utilization index does a great job of highlighting the effects of lockdown on fall in production activity.

The capacity utilization index (which measures the output currently produced as a percentage of its full capacity) dipped below 65.0 percent, whereas in the United States the long-run average (1972–2019) has been 80.1 percent. The index during the lockdown was just 1.9 percentage points above its trough during the Great Recession.

When the production of consumer goods and their direct inputs started to increase, that led to increasing demand for goods in the primary sector. This pressure is a result of increasing competition in the market for scarce resources, there are some primary goods which hold more importance than others as they serve as the base of the products to be produced. These primary sector goods include oil, steel, various forms of metals, food inputs, etc. It was when the producers of these and other primary goods began raising their prices that inflation became an internal, self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Is a Recession Coming?

While the government was extending its fiscal hands to monetary stimulus, the Federal Reserve had already started lowering its interest rate at the end of 2019. Suddenly, with the onset of covid, it went full throttle and lowered the rate from 1.58 percent in February 2020 to a disastrous 0.06 percent in April of that year and kept it near zero for two whole years. It was still 0.08 percent in February 2022, near the time when the realization that inflation was not transitory set in.

But the damage had already been done. The low interest rates had created a massive expansion, which gave the impression that the US economy had recovered from the lockdown-imposed recession. The result of this expansion was immediately seen in the increased number of businesses opening during the one-year period between March 2020 and April 2021. It is estimated by the Census Bureau. that a total of 4.4 million new jobs were created during that year.

This boom created out of the massive credit expansion and monetary handouts led to increasing investment and capital formation in the form of new equipment, new machines, new shops, new factories, etc., to fulfill future demands that entrepreneurs expected to happen in the future. Entrepreneurs were led to these, what may turn out to be mistaken expectations by the increased spending in the economy created by those monetary handouts and easy money policies during from late 2019 to early 2022.

Today, while the Fed is combatting rising inflation by increasing its interest rate, inflation has already become a self-perpetuating phenomenon that lowers people's real income. When prices rise, the total products and services that a consumer can buy with his present income drop, therefore a consumer in order to do best with his left income scrutinizes his consumption from previous periods and picks the most important ones he can afford while having to give up consuming others. During a general rise in prices, this effect takes place in sectors, which leads to fall in industry level demand for goods.

When demand starts to fall, the revenue received by each consumer goods or services firm falls. These firms then cut back on their output, which leads to unemployment. This is where we stand today, at the edge of a possible stagflation. The next few months will be crucial with respect to the severity of this stagflation. If the unemployment rate increases over the next few months and inflation doesn't subside, then we may be heading into a recession in the next fiscal year. 

This recession will be a product of exuberant consumer spending and investments fueled by monetary handouts and easy money policies. Entrepreneurs make investments on the basis of future expectations of profits, and during the covid period, expansive monetary stimulus led to rising demand and profit levels which fueled and sustained these expectations. These investments, which are destined to fail, are a result of the deliberate distortions of price and profit signals which the government and central banking engaged in through manipulating interest rates and fueling spending.

Firms pay interest on their loans, which implies their profit margin must be above the amount of interest paid in order to continue production. Lower interest rates therefore also increased the profit margins of firms.

Today the Federal Reserve is increasing its interest rate while high inflation is lowering consumer demand; both these factors are contributing to reducing the profit that firms realize. Firms in response will reduce and cut back on production, which will lead to increasing unemployment, and increasing accumulation of unsold inventories in the market. This latter point is demonstrated by the fact that the monthly change in wholesale inventories in the US was an increase of 2.3 percent to $840.3 billion in March of 2022.

If prices keep increasing while rising unemployment reduces consumer spending, then the prices of all other outputs will decrease, because the prices of input goods depend partially on the prices of final output goods. This reduction in prices will tend to lower inflation, but a recession will already be underway. Both the Fed and the government will be defenseless, as the Fed, to fulfill its 2 percent inflation mandate, will increase interest rates, while the government's fiscal arm will be restrained due to the high political costs associated with more handouts prior to the upcoming elections, and with the experience of its constituents with inflation.

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The Pandemic of Executive Overreach Comes to an End. When Will the Next One Begin?

Posted: 29 May 2022 06:15 AM PDT

While the covid-19 pandemic brought sickness and death, another pandemic raged through Washington: abuse of executive power.

Original Article: "The Pandemic of Executive Overreach Comes to an End. When Will the Next One Begin?"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

Austrian Economists Are Not Surprised by the Shortages

Posted: 28 May 2022 06:15 AM PDT

While supporters of the Biden administration fault Putin for shortages, Austrian economists know the answer lies in Washington's monetary and economic mismanagement.

Original Article: "Austrian Economists Are Not Surprised by the Shortages"

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

The Backstory of the Great Reset, or How to Destroy Classical Liberalism

Posted: 28 May 2022 04:00 AM PDT

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama's declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at "the end of history" did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism. In fact, for Fukuyama, the terminus of history was always democratic socialism or social democracy. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted in Democracy: The God That Failed, "the Last Man" standing was not a capitalist homo economicus but rather a "homo socio-democraticus" (222). The end of history, with all its Hegelian pretenses, did not entail the defeat of socialism-communism but rather of classical liberalism. Evidently, the big state and big capital were supposed to have reached an inevitable and final détente. The Great Reset is the consummation of this final détente.

The elite subversion of the free-market system and republican democracy had already been underway for many decades before "the end of history." According to Cleon W. Skousen in The Naked Capitalist, elites positioned within major banks, large corporations, leading think tanks, influential publishing companies, the media, tax-exempt foundations, the educational system, and the US government sought to remake the US in the image of its (former) collectivist archrival since at least the early 1930s (57-68). As Carrol Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), elites propagated socialist, communist, and other collectivist ideologies at home, while funding and arming the Bolsheviks in Russia and the communists in Vietnam and promoting international policies that led to the deliberate abandonment of eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to the communist scourge.

For many, the goal of advancing socialism has been most evident in the alacrity with which the institutions of higher education have absorbed and circulated Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxist collectivist ideologies in their various guises at least since the early 1930s—including Soviet propaganda, critical theory, postmodern theory, and the most recent variants, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and LGBTQIA+ ideology. The dreaded "long march through the institutions" was never a bottom-up, grassroots project. Rather, it was an inside job undertaken by elites in positions of power and influence. When the philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists of the Frankfurt school of critical theory emigrated to the US in 1933—armed with the Marxist theory of revolution and Antonio Gramsci's model for socialist cultural hegemony—they hardly inaugurated this march. Rather, they were welcomed by elites and funded by tax-exempt foundations whose work was already well underway.1 The so-called long march through the institutions was a stampede within them.

To understand the Great Reset, then, we must recognize that the project represents the completion of a centuries-long and ongoing attempt to destroy classical liberalism (the free market, free speech, and liberal democracy), American constitutionalism, and national sovereignty. The idea of resetting capitalism suggests that capitalism had previously been pure. But the Great Reset is the culmination of a much longer collectivization process and democratic socialist project, with their corresponding growth of the state. Despite being pitched as the antidote to the supposed weaknesses of the free market, which World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab and company equate with "neoliberalism," the Great Reset is meant to intensify and complete an already prevalent economic interventionism, and to use US-led military power to complete this process where economic intervention proves unsuccessful. This explains, in part, the West's arming and funding of Ukraine against its Russian attacker.

I do not mean to suggest that the Great Reset's global neo-Marxist economics, and its international rather than national economic fascism, are not new. They are new, as are the means by which they are to be brought about. But we must not be so confused as to think that the Great Reset project was born ab nihilo—it's the culmination of decades of elite thinking and activism.

  • 1. The Frankfurt school theorist Herbert Marcuse, for example, was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; repr., London: Routledge, 2002), p. iv, where Marcuse acknowledges such funding.

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To Succeed, the AfCFTA Must Be about Actual Free Trade, Not Government-Managed "Free Trade"

Posted: 28 May 2022 04:00 AM PDT

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the world's largest free trade area by the number of countries. It is the most ambitious and, given demographic trends, the most promising free trade project on earth. The AfCFTA matters very much to Africa's economies separately and to the continent's collaborative and integrated economic development. If successful, it also carries significant implications for the global economy. As such, the AfCFTA matters. Not just for Africans but for everyone. 

The AfCFTA was established in 2018, and trading under the agreement officially started on January 1, 2021. I say officially because, oddly, no trade has taken place under the agreement to date. Over a year later. 

Although with governments almost everything takes longer and costs more than otherwise, it is confusing, unsettling, and perhaps also embarrassing that sixteen months since the start of trading, no trade has taken place under the AfCFTA. Especially considering that to lift millions out of poverty and spur real economic development across the continent, Africans must freely trade with one another on a larger scale.

So why hasn't trading taken off under the AfCFTA?

No, it is not due to covid restrictions, the Russia-Ukraine war, or other external factors. The reason postcolonial African societies barely trade with one another is philosophical. At independence, instead of dismantling the colonial mercantilist barriers to restore free and borderless trade between Africans, African leaders, driven by socialist thinking, doubled down on colonial statist and protectionist regimes and, in most cases, made then even more statist and repressive. That is essentially why intra-African trade has been dismally low.

Source: Tralac.

Africa's Heavily Statist Economic Systems

Contrary to entrenched views, today's economies from the first world to the third are not free-market capitalist. Even the United States, the stronghold of "capitalism," is not a free-market economy. Instead, we, humanity, live under statist economic systems of varying severity. 

As explained in this article, some of the most statist (i.e., cruel and oppressive) systems are found in Africa. The vast majority of African countries are consistently ranked as mostly unfree and repressed in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. Two refreshing exceptions are Mauritius, which ranks as mostly free, and Botswana, which stands out for its relative economic success. 

In this context of repressive statist economic systems, it should not be a surprise that, sixteen months later, no trade has taken place under the AfCFTA. Said another way, trading has not yet taken place due to the suffocating degree of economic and monetary repression imposed on Africans by African governments.

African politicians and bureaucrats, most of whom hold statist/socialist views, are still reluctant to dismantle the many artificial barriers that repress trade among Africans. The paradox here is that the very politicians who ratified the agreement to establish a single African market are the same politicians hesitating to dismantle colonial and postcolonial artificial barriers that prevent Africans from trading freely. It will take boldness and a tectonic shift in economic thinking for  intra-African trade to take off and for the AfCFTA to succeed: African politicians will have to remove the many artificial economic and monetary barriers in place. 

Yes, the existence of the AfCFTA is clear and indeed remarkable proof of African leaders' commitment to creating a single African market. But how free or unfree will the market be? I contend it must be genuinely free.

Although the AfCFTA is a decisive step toward free trade within Africa, its success is not guaranteed due to the statist/socialist economic thinking among African decision-makers and the prevalence of anti–free market, anti–free trade, and anti–free enterprise beliefs among the public.

Now, the AfCFTA Secretariat could hire a major consulting firm to analyze why trade has still not taken place. The consulting firm would, of course, come up with a pile of graphs and numbers explaining the many reasons why such is. However, the fundamental reason is philosophical and hides in plain sight. 

The AfCFTA Can Be Approached in Two Ways

African political leaders can approach the AfCFTA in one of two ways: the market way or the statist way.

In the statist way, governments play the leading role in centrally controlling, commanding, and regulating economic activity (i.e., people's lives). This has been the approach in Africa since "independence," which, evidently, failed to create free and prosperous African societies. 

The market way is the natural economic system. Individuals existed long before government or the state emerged. Human life, human action (rational and purposeful), human cooperation, property ownership, and therefore free markets, free trade, and free enterprise long predate the state and all forms of government. With the market approach, African leaders would, at last, let Africans live, move, produce, innovate, and trade freely across the AfCFTA. 

In contrast, the statist way would continue to repress and thus severely undermine the AfCFTA's full potential. Politicians and bureaucrats would continue to hold power over the economy (i.e., people's lives). Consequently, corruption, cronyism, tyranny, injustice, rent seeking, embezzling, favoritism, mass unemployment, rampant inflation, crippling debt, burdensome taxation, and widespread poverty, to name a few problems, would likely continue as they have over the last fifty years. More tragically, Africa's unprecedented demographic dividend and youthful entrepreneurial energy would remain largely repressed and thus wasted, as it is today. 

The market way is the only way to generate broad-based, decentralized, and enduring economic development. The free market is the only sustainable economic system. It is also the only system that ensures Africa's demographic dividend becomes a great blessing and not a great curse. In other words, the market-driven approach is the only way to ensure the AfCFTA's full potential is realized. There is no third way. An economic system can either be driven by the market or the state.

Africans Must Trade Freely Again 

Government-managed free trade is not free trade. The AfCFTA should be about actual free trade. A single free African market.

Forbes Africa asks: "Will the AfCFTA Be the Heartbeat of the Global Economy?"

The AfCFTA does have the potential to become the heartbeat of the global economy. But African decision-makers must necessarily abandon their deep-seated statist and socialist economic views and embrace free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. 

More importantly, African leaders must embrace Africa's economic heritage of free markets, free trade, and free enterprise because such is the only way to recreate free and borderless African trade, which would liberate the continent from its pernicious and pervasive colonial legacies, as elucidated by Dr. Steve Davies in Restoring Trade in Africa: Liberating the Continent from the Colonial Legacy.

In "The Humanity of Trade," Frank Chodorov clarifies:

Let us test the claims of "protectionists" with an experiment in logic. If a people prosper by the amount of foreign goods they are not permitted to have, then a complete embargo, rather than a restriction, would do them the most good. Continuing that line of reasoning, would it not be better all around if each community were hermetically sealed off from its neighbor, like Philadelphia from New York? Better still, would not every household have more on its table if it were compelled to live on its own production? Silly as this reductio ad absurdum is, it is no sillier than the "protectionist" argument that a nation is enriched by the amount of foreign goods it keeps out of its market, or the "balance of trade" argument that a nation prospers by the excess of its exports over imports.

Indeed, there are no cogent arguments protectionists can use to justify the economic balkanization within Africa and the continuation of the many tariff, nontariff, and other artificial restrictions that prevent Africans from trading freely.

Most African societies are essentially at the same level of economic development and socioeconomic precarity. To maintain the prevailing artificial barriers to trade among Africans, or to remove them only partially, is as nonsensical as South Carolinians feeling economically threatened by North Carolinians and agitating for trade barriers.

In his article "Could the AfCFTA Recreate Lost African Trade Networks?," Alexander Jelloian notes:

Colonialism caused an increase in protectionist trade policies as European powers partitioned Africa without paying sufficient attention to social, economic, or geographic factors. Controls by the colonial authorities restructured economic life away from the natural trade relations that had existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In most states, the situation did not improve after independence, as many new African leaders pursued state-led development and hoped that import substitution would spur domestic manufacturing. Industrialisation never occurred in any substantial way in most of the continent. Post-independence governments that pursued African socialism have usually kept high tariffs and border controls to this day, which continue to stifle economic growth.

Conclusion 

To succeed, the AfCFTA must be about actual free trade and establishing a free single African market. Government-managed "free trade" is not free trade.

Approaching the AfCFTA with today's heavily statist economic thinking is a recipe for the complete or partial failure of the AfCFTA, the world's most ambitious and most promising free trade project. Because the AfCFTA matters very much for reasons that go beyond free trade, ensuring its success is vital. 

Even though it is challenging to imagine African governments relinquishing the repressive control and commanding power they have amassed over the lives of Africans since independence, it is, nonetheless, vital that African leaders abandon imported statist concepts and genuinely embrace Africa's economic heritage of free markets, free trade, and free enterprise if the AfCFTA is to succeed in delivering integrated, decentralized, broad-based, and enduring continental economic development. 

Present and future African leaders must remove all—yes, all—artificial restrictions that suppress, repress, and otherwise hinder the free production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services within Africa.

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