[…] the [World Baseball Classic] allows Organized Baseball to sustain the structures that constitute its inner purity, maintaining the boundaries of its regular and post seasons above all against all challenge by foreign teams, all the while increasing its global reach in recruiting talent and vending its commodity […A]ll the champions and perennial powers of the world’s other leading leagues need not apply. […] To call [Organized Baseball] an empire, or even a monopoly, is to seriously underestimate it. It is to fail to see the form of power it wields in shaping the separateness of its own commodious world, controlling access, avoiding and deflecting competition, limiting liability, sustaining and elaborating fictions of separate but equal, and mostly separate. […] For all of our ease in understanding objections to racism, for all that we can see the flaws in separate but equal when it generated the Major Leagues and the Negro Leagues, most of us now, not only but especially Americans, have no inkling how strange and immoral will someday seem our sanguine acceptance of the legal fortresses of limited liability and nation-state self-determination. (170-172)

These passages are from the last few pages of American anthropologist John D Kelly’s short book The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball. You can read it for yourself, but my short summary of the book is that it pleads for free trade. Not the theoretical free trade of economists, mind you, but of a practical free trade that opens up borders to labor (Kelly points out that it is really hard to play in the Majors if you are not an American, but shortsightedly blames US policy when other nation-states harbor just as much of the blame; if anything, the US has one of the more open immigration policies in the world today) and to marketplace competition (i.e. capital) in the realm of goods and services. I don’t know if this is a conclusion that Kelly would be comfortable being associated with, given that he is a man of the Left, but what would you call a world where baseball teams from Cuba, the US, the Netherlands, Japan, etc. compete with each other on an even playing field for labor, fans, and prestige?

The stubbornness of the Left is sometimes astounding. Kelly is right to lament the fact that the American baseball league (“Organized Baseball”) wields so much power in international baseball, but he doesn’t spell out an explicit remedy for solving this issue. Instead, it seems as if he is mystified as to how this could possibly happen. He understands and acknowledges that Organized Baseball derives much of its power from being located in the world’s most powerful nation-state, but he also understands that free trade (of labor and capital) is the answer to this issue without explicitly acknowledging this fact.

It seems to me that this is an issue where libertarians and internationalist Leftists can work together, provided we clarify a few concepts. Free trade is the answer for a lot of problems in the world today. Internationalists on both the Left and the Right realize this (see also Delacroix). The New Left intelligentsia, though, wants a practical free trade, and it often accuses economists of arguing for a theoretical free trade. But this critique is made in bad faith: Because economists are more familiar with the theoretical version of free trade, they are, as a whole, more willing to make compromises in the form of small steps towards more free trade. The New Left intelligentsia, instead of taking into account all the various options that can be done to move toward a freer world, including political limitations on what can be done to open societies up more to each other, has decided instead to poo-poo the small steps advocated by economists, and all in the name of practicality!

I agree with Kelly and others about the nation-state being a tool of segregation in today’s world. Unlike the New Left, though, I wholeheartedly embrace the pragmatic steps being taken to erode this segregation through the peaceful medium of free trade, even if it is not True Free Trade.