{"id":130609,"date":"2025-07-04T16:50:35","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T15:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/?p=130609"},"modified":"2025-07-08T13:37:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T12:37:18","slug":"common-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/common-sense\/","title":{"rendered":"Common sense"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian Felber is a writer, lecturer and contemporary dancer. He founded the Economy for the Common Good<\/em> movement, which has spread around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He has been thinking about how trade could work for humanity for the last decade and published Trading for Good: How Global Trade Can be Made to Serve People Not Money<\/em> in 2019 and recently published a proposal for reform for the EU<\/a> with fellow authors Prof. Brigitta Herrmann and J\u00fcrgen Knirsch\u00a0. The Mint <\/em>spoke with him to get a better understanding of his proposals for Ethical World Trade better and explore how they could be implemented.<\/p>\n

Summary<\/h3>\n

Key Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  • Felber proposes “ethical world trade” as an alternative to the false dichotomy between free trade and protectionism<\/li>\n
  • He advocates for trade to serve higher goals like human rights, peace, and climate protection, rather than being an end in itself<\/li>\n
  • Felber suggests reforming international institutions to make noble goals enforceable, not just trade rules<\/li>\n
  • He sees potential for the EU to lead on trade reform, despite current trade tensions with the US<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Topics<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Ethical World Trade Proposal<\/strong><\/p>\n

      \n
    • Positions trade as a means to serve higher goals, not an end in itself<\/li>\n
    • Aims to align trade with objectives like human rights, peace, democracy, climate protection<\/li>\n
    • Proposes enforceable agreements on goals, not just trade rules<\/li>\n
    • Suggests allowing countries flexibility on openness\/protection, with balanced trade as condition<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      Critique of Current Trade System<\/strong><\/p>\n

        \n
      • World Trade Organization (WTO) makes trade rules enforceable, but not higher goals<\/li>\n
      • Current system can force countries to be more open than desired<\/li>\n
      • US-China tensions partly due to large US trade deficit ($1 trillion) with no solution offered<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

        Implementation Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n

          \n
        • Spread idea via opinion leaders and academic publications<\/li>\n
        • Focus on reforming EU trade policy, starting with Article 206<\/li>\n
        • Increase democracy to allow citizens to mandate trade policy approach<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

          Historical Context<\/strong><\/p>\n

            \n
          • Builds on previous attempts like Keynes’ Bancor plan from 1944<\/li>\n
          • References UNCTAD as precedent for trade serving development<\/li>\n
          • Notes Germany’s 1967 law on balanced trade, recent citizen council recommendation<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            Christian Felber is a writer, lecturer and contemporary dancer. He founded the Economy for the Common Good movement, which has spread around the world.\u00a0 He has been thinking about how … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58,2],"tags":[350,2824,2823,2825],"class_list":["post-130609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","category-interviews","tag-christian-felber","tag-ethical-trade","tag-june-2025","tag-trade-wars","post_format-post-format-video"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}