COLUMN RIGHT/ VIRGINIA I. POSTREL : Small Is Still Beautiful for Anti-Traders : Greens and nationalists are against NAFTA because they’re against trade. It’s that simple.

The North American Free Trade Agreement looks like the rarest of deals: It offers something for free-traders, who believe that trade makes everyone better off, and something for their mercantilist foes, who like exports but not imports.

Mexico has historically maintained very high barriers to U.S. goods and services. Even after recent liberalizations, tariffs on U.S. exports to Mexico remain an average of 10%, compared with 4% on Mexican exports to the United States. NAFTA would change that for most businesses. By expanding markets, it promises to add $30 billion to gross domestic product. Trade economists estimate that while imports from Mexico will increase, exports to Mexico will increase by even more.

Nor will jobs simply be sucked south by lower wage rates. Total cost and total productivity, not just labor cost, determine where to site a plant. Labor constitutes only a small fraction of U.S. manufacturing costs--15% for automobiles, for instance. Other costs, such as electricity and transportation, are more significant and generally lower in the United States.

Despite its advantages, NAFTA faces ferocious opposition. The question is why.

The answer lies in a new anti-trade ideology, one distinct from old-fashioned mercantilism. It is the ideology of “national self-sufficiency.”

Proponents of national self-sufficiency believe that the only way for a nation to be rich and strong is to be economically self-sufficient--to grow its own food and produce its own industrial products. The interdependence created by a global economy is dangerous, they say, because it allows foreigners to decide whom to buy from or sell to and at what price. Proponents of self-sufficiency seek nothing less than to impose economic sanctions on their own country--to withdraw from the world economy.

The chief ideologists of national self-sufficiency are “green” theorists. Their intellectual godfather is E.F. Schumacher, whose 1973 book, “Small Is Beautiful,” attacked the specialization of modern society. Schumacher celebrated traditional village life and suggested that individuals should produce their own food, clothing and shelter. Schumacher criticized modern life for allowing too much mobility of people and products. “Dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant people is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale.”

His intellectual heirs continue to influence environmental activists. In their 1989 book, “For the Common Good,” for example, World Bank economist Herman E. Daly and theologian John B. Cobb Jr. call for “change on the part of the world’s greatest trading nation from commitment to a global system of free trade to the goal of national self-sufficiency.” They would impose increasingly high tariffs over a 10-year period. Eventually, tariffs would be high enough to deter all imports.

In fact, Daly and Cobb say they share Kirkpatrick Sale’s ideal of not just national but local self-sufficiency: towns of no more than 10,000 residents producing everything from food to clothes to steel--but not such non-essential items as planes or cars.

Self-sufficiency theorists are little known outside the environmental movement. But their economic analysis--with its belief that trade drives down wages and its fear of depending on foreigners--has seeped into the arguments of nationalistic “trade hawks.”

The result is an unlikely alliance, which includes both Ross Perot and Jeremy Rifkin, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader. This coalition, despite obvious political divisions, shares a common commitment to collective decision-making over individual economic choices, to regional and national isolationism and to static social and economic arrangements.

Both the greens and the nationalists are deeply ideological and profoundly anti-cosmopolitan. Their objections to NAFTA, and to free trade generally, cannot be countered by studies and statistics.

That is why Daly and Cobb never talk about Singapore or Hong Kong, which prosper while depending on trade. It is why Ross Perot frets that U.S. semiconductor manufacturers don’t make enough commodity DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) chips, and ignore their success with more valuable specialized chips.

Above all, the resolute ideology of national self-sufficiency is why no amount of tinkering with NAFTA will placate either environmentalists or economic nationalists. They do not like NAFTA because they do not like trade. As Ross Perot might say, it’s that simple.