I think everyone agrees in abstract that removing trade subsidies is a good thing but in practice you run into the Scylla of foreign governments that through currency manipulation or corporate dumping and on the other hand the Charybdis of protectionist domestic lobbies.

"Free trade" won't really be possible without forming international producer coalitions that will help regulate and standardize practices among producers. I'm not talking "quotas" or anything ridiculous here, just the sort of general agreements and WTO enforceable production and sale practices that would prevent gouging, market-share capture through dumping, etc.

These issues are just too complex to wave away in the abstract ... everybody from the agribusiness lobby to Starbucks which is raising prices for increased dairy costs to shippers are going to want to have a say. The most important step we can take is to create such forums and staff them with the appropriate legal consul and mediators to work out disputes between industry representatives of different countries.

Essentially each industry from steel to Bree cheese production to Brazilian bananna imports is going to have to get hashed out in excruciating minutae.

If this doesn't happen, we'll never see the political will to identify and remove all the implicit and explicit subsidies and trade barriers.

Apparently everyone doesn't think free trade is such a grand idea. In fact, according to this article, it is a tool through which developed nations can suppress the progress of developing nations:

http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2003/09/53817.php

What Oldman is describing is exactly what does happen in a typical trade negotiation, especially one involving agriculture.

The short-term objective of such a negotiation is never "free trade" but "trade liberalization." Long-term objectives may be another story, depending on how far ahead you are looking; The important thing is to recognize that steps toward trade liberalization are not failures because they don't result in free trade as presented in an academic model.

I can't speak for Oldman, and in fact rather doubt this is his view, but there are plenty of libertarian commentators who recognize no such thing -- they will sometimes complain (after the fact) about government attempts to restrict trade, but look on specific steps to liberalize some sectors most burdened by trade barriers and subsidies with little more than a kind of hostile indifference, precisely because trade liberalization so rarely involves scrapping all rules instead of replacing a restrictive set of rules with a less restrictive one.

There are few policy areas where the distance between the Bush administration and its Republican predecessors is greater than trade. I've been sorry to see Republicans overall be fairly unmoved by this, but libertarians seem hardly to have noticed.