Former Democratic Representative Charles Vanik passed away recently. Although Rep. Vanik and I disagreed on most major political issues, I nonetheless owe him a debt that can never be repaid.

In 1974, Vanik and Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson co-sponsored the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied the Soviet Union and some other totalitarian states "most favored nation" trade status unless they permitted free emigration of their citizens. The Amendment was passed by Congress despite the opposition of the Nixon Administration.

In part as a result of the pressure brought to bear by the Amendment, the USSR began to allow the emigration of Soviet Jews and members of several other ethnic and religious minority groups, such as Germans, Armenians, and Pentecostals. Were it not for the efforts of Jackson, Vanik, and their supporters, hundreds of thousands of people - including our senior Conspirator and myself - might have been trapped in a totalitarian state for many years longer. The Russian immigrant community in this country owes Representative Vanik a great debt. My respectful condolences to his family and friends.

UPDATE: Here is a more extensive obituary in the New York Times. It includes a great quote by Rep. Vanik:

In 1988, five years after Mr. Jackson died, the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev urged the amendment to be scrapped, saying: "Why should the dead hold onto the coattails of the living? I mean the Jackson-Vanik amendment. One of them is already physically dead. The other is politically dead."

. . . Mr. Vanik countered: "Lenin has been dead for a long time, and they still live under his guidance."

UPDATE #2: The Jackson-Vanik Amendment and other similar legislation raise an interesting issue in libertarian theory - whether libertarianism is consistent with restrictions on trade with socialist states. I do not think it is appropriate to address that issue in an obituary post. So I will instead consider it in a follow-up. Comments on that issue should also be attached to the follow-up post rather than this one.

Libertarianism is generally seen as requiring free trade. Certainly, libertarian thinkers from Adam Smith to the present have strongly condemned protectionism. How then can a libertarian endorse trade restrictions such as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denied free trade to totalitarian states that refused to allow their citizens to emigrate freely?

Perhaps I am blinded by my parochial interest in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, but I think there is a compelling answer to this question. Libertarianism does indeed imply free trade between private individuals and firms. But trade with socialist governments is very different. When two private individuals trade with each other, it is reasonable to assume that both legitimately own the goods they exchange. Thus, at least as far as libertarians are concerned, the law should not restrict their transactions unless there is specific proof that one or both are trading in stolen or otherwise illicitly acquired goods. By contrast, a socialist state engaging in international trade is usually exchanging goods that it forcibly acquired from its citizens. The socialist state's goods are either confiscated from former private owners or produced by compelling workers to work for the state (which they generally must do whether they want to or not, because there is no competitive employment market). Socialist states also make extensive use of out and out forced labor. In a true socialist state - one where the government owns all the means of production and the state has a monopoly of foreign trade - trade in forcibly acquired goods is the only kind of international exchange that is possible at all. Just as in the domestic context libertarianism is perfectly consistent with forbidding trade in stolen goods, in the international context it is consistent with forbidding trade with socialist governments that, by definition (as libertarians see it), have acquired their wealth by plundering their citizens.

True socialist states must be distinguished from nominally socialist societies (such as China today) that nonetheless permit a large private sector to exist and engage in international trade. However, the USSR at the time of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (like Cuba and North Korea today) was a fully socialist society with almost no private enterprise and a complete government monopoly of foreign trade.

Restrictions on trade with socialist states may or may not be good policy. Sometimes trade with such states can serve important strategic interests (as with US trade with the Soviet Union when the two nations were allied during World War II). Critics of trade sanctions claim that they fail to achieve their goals and may even be counterproductive. Be that as it may, restricting trade with socialist states does not violate any libertarian principles.