Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

For a border between nations, there has never been anything close to the openness of the line separating the United States and Canada. Stretching 3,000 miles, it has always been sparsely guarded and easy to cross. The movement of people and goods back and forth has been something for other countries to admire and duplicate. Yet the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — a proposed economic bloc uniting Canada, the U.S., and Mexico — would seriously damage this widely envied nation-to-nation relationship.

According to both its name and its disingenuous promoters, NAFTA is supposed to be about freedom. But how can something containing 2,000 pages of regulations and controls have anything to do with freedom? The answer is that NAFTA is not about free trade; NAFTA is about setting up a supranational government bureaucracy to control what should not be controlled.

The period of history in which we live will surely be remembered as an era when people-to-people activity became the target of planners, managers, schemers, and one-worlders who think of producers as pawns to move around on a gigantic chessboard. But for centuries, Canadians and Americans who had goods to sell have always been able, without any force or bureaucratic “guidance,” to conduct business across their common border. When Mexicans had anything to sell, the same happened at our southern border. As long as the peoples across borders have economic reasons to deal with each other, that is precisely what they will do. But the schemers who do not want people and nations to be free have other ideas.

Easy-to-Find Objections

NAFTA would empower a North American Commission on the Environment (NACE) with an environmental police force to conduct searches, issue fines, and harass individuals who try to create wealth by producing goods. Article 1114 would prevent any nation party to the agreement from easing or canceling any environmental rules. This would mean that current regulations restricting the development of huge natural resources in Alaska and other parts of our nation — not to mention similar regulations keeping Canadians from turning their natural resources into production — could never be repealed. NAFTA would permanently lock up huge treasures that should have been open to development.

NAFTA proposes that the U.S. contribute the lion’s share of a multi-million dollar “environmental trust fund.” It calls on our nation to guarantee a $3 to $4 billion loan to help bring Mexico into the 20th century economically. Mexico’s economic growth, held down throughout this century by its own bloated and dictatorial government, is now supposed to be aided by more government emanating from a new three-nation bureaucracy and paid for with massive amounts of U.S. foreign aid.

Sense out of Nonsense  

There is nothing about NAFTA that makes sense unless its promoters keep their ultimate goals in the shadows. If, for instance, they want to tear America and Canada down and build Mexico up so that an eventual political merger and world government can be accomplished, then NAFTA meets the test of logic.

If someone trying to figure out NAFTA can be made aware that economic union precedes political union, and the top promoters of this agreement are long on world government and short on national sovereignty, then it again makes a great deal of sense. Look at what the economic union known as the European Community is already doing and plans to do to the fading independence of France, Germany, England, etc. This is what NAFTA’s champions plan to do to the nations it will ensnare.

NAFTA should be opposed for dozens of reasons. But the chief objection should be that it is a giant step toward the new world order in which all of mankind — Canadians, Americans, Mexicans, and everyone — will be enslaved by political and economic controllers who care only about power over the human race.