So, here’s something that was written and submitted and then rejected. Teh editors said not enough bile, spleen or venom. So, instead of you being able to read it after I’ve been paid for it, you can read it without my being paid for it. What a deal, eh?

(BTW, as anyone who has done freelancing for any length of time will tell you, a rejection rate of anything less than 50% is a victory.)

This year has seen the 50^th
anniversary of the invention of the shipping container, next year
will see the 50th of the Treaty of Rome. The impact of the two upon
trade provides as elegant an example of the classically liberal
conceit as one could wish for.

The Treaty of Rome (25^th
March, 1957) started the process to the customs union we have today,
where we are encouraged to purchase items made in close geographical
proximity to ourselves. Tarrifs and quotas push us to purchasing our
butter from Normandy rather than New Zealand and at the time this all
seemed entirely logical, for it was obvious to the planners that
ocean transport was expensive. By changing the price incentives, by
disrupting purely historic or cultural connections, we should base
our trade system on the obviously most important matter, the high
costs of long distance transport.

When the first converted oil
tanker sailed out of Newark, bound for Houston with 58 containers on
her deck on 26 th April 1956, this entire calculation began to
change. The greatest cost in freight transportation has always been
in “breaking bulk”, the process of unloading myriad items from a
train or truck at the dockside, loading each item singly into the
hold of a ship and then, at the other end, reversing the process.
Containerization completely changes that equation, so much so that as
Marc Levinson has pointed out in The Box, long distance ocean
transport now costs some 1% of the retail value of goods, down from
the 10-20% using the older method. As long as both the producing
factory and the receiving warehouse are part of the international
transport system (and the goods are being shipped in multiples of the
29 tonnes certain containers hold) geographical proximity really no
longer matters.

Thus the classically liberal
conceit or observation, that planners are doomed to get it wrong.
Even if they had known of that single ship they would not have
recognized the long term implications, that the cost element of trade
they considered most important was about to become an irrelevance. An
elegant exposition of the fact that techno- and bureau- crats are
just like their colleagues in the military, the Generals, always
ready to fight the last war.