 The title of my talk is the case for free trade. I'm going to address some of the arguments for free trade and some of the arguments for protectionism, tariffs, and I only have 45 minutes, so I kind of have to not tackle all of the thorny issues here, but I'll try to provide you with a foundation for thinking about these arguments. I'll try to provide you with a framework for thinking about the arguments for free trade and protectionism. It's my position that the Austrians need to spend more time on these issues. There's not a whole lot about this in human action or man economy and state. There are books that are Austrian-ish on this issue, and I'll mention a couple of them while I'm talking today. We start with the fact that by now you have a firm grasp on the argument that in an unhampered market economy, resources tend to be allocated towards consumers most urgent wants because entrepreneurs have a profit incentive to do just that. The unhampered market economy is economically preferable to interventionism. That argument does not directly counter the arguments for tariffs. And the reason is tariffs hamper the world economy. They don't necessarily, the arguments for an unhampered economy do not apply to tariffs because tariffs hamper the world economy. So we're talking about the domestic economy. Both sides of the debate are concerned with the domestic economy, not the world economy. And Mises makes this point. In human action, Mises says that liberals believe that peaceful international cooperation is a more appropriate means than conflict for attainment of the end, which they and the nationalists are both aiming at, their own nation's welfare. They do not, as the nationalists charge, advocate peace and free trade in order to betray their own nation's interests to those of foreigners. On the contrary, they consider peace and free trade the best means to make their own nation wealthy. What separates the free traders from the nationalists is not ends, but the means recommended for attainment of the ends common to both. So both sides of the debate are generally talking about the domestic economy. All right, the next point is, consider the following question. Could the government intervene in the economy in a manner that enriched Alabama at the expense of other parts of the economy? And undoubtedly they could. We agree on this, we write about these things. And could they use the tariff to harm, to exploit regions of the economy and benefit other regions of the economy? Yes, they could. And they did exactly that throughout the 1800s. They used the tariff, the North used the tariff to enrich the Northern business interests and exploit the South. I'll just cite Tom DeLorenzo's real Lincoln on this, where a Northern newspaper editor admits exactly that. The Daily Chicago Times candidly admitted that the tariff was indeed a tool used by Northerners for the purpose of plundering the South. The editor of the newspaper warned that the benefits of this political plunder would be threatened by the existence of free trade in the South. You can use the tariff to transfer wealth from the South to the North. So we have to ask ourselves, why can't they use the tariff to transfer wealth from Asia to the US? That's the argument for tariffs, right? The argument for tariffs is not that it doesn't hurt the world economy, it's that the benefits of the tariff outweigh any damage to our domestic economy. So we're almost giving in to them because we admit they can use the tariff to transfer wealth from one region to another. All right. I already sense skepticism here. All right, well, we start off always with the argument that there's gains from trade. Dr. Rittenauer has covered this completely, so I don't have to say very much about this, but I'll make a few comments. When Dr. Rittenauer talked about the division of labor earlier this week, did a great job. Of course, there are benefits from trade. Mises recognizes this in many places. I'll cite one such article, Autarchy the Road to Misery. Mises argues that the division of labor is the foundation of European culture here. It's an older article, but this doesn't have anything to do with tariffs. This just, Mises is just arguing that trade is better than not trading. And the basis of this argument is usually we start with Adam Smith here, where Smith argued among many other things regarding a trade. He argued that the division of labor leads to specialization, and in that specialization, we're more productive. If I spend lots of time doing something, I just become better at it. You know, if I, well, the example's about, you know, if I work on my own cards, but I'm not a very good mechanic, but if I was spent 40 hours a week being a mechanic, I would just, I'd become very good at it. Smith says, the division of labor, however, so far as it could be introduced, occasions in every art, in every art, a proportionate increase of the productive powers of labor, making this point. And then he goes on to start to build the case for free trade by spending several pages on the extent of the market. And if there's a greater extent to the market, then there's greater gains from trade. So if we trade within the United States, the division of labor occurs, and there's gains from trade, if we also trade with Europeans and Asians, there's a greater extent of the market, and there's greater gains from trade. Most people, or many people, I don't know if most, many people when they make the case for free trade, so based their argument on Ricardo's principle of comparative advantage in his 1817 book, there's some debate if this is actually Ricardo's work, but for today's purposes, we don't need to concern ourselves with that. And Ricardo points out or makes the case that nations concentrate on producing the goods in which they're a low opportunity cost producer, and they import the goods in which they're a high opportunity cost producer that they'll benefit. And both parties that do this, both parties to the trade will benefit from this type of trade. This is a foundational argument in economics. Paul Samuelson, when he was asked to cite something in the social sciences, cite a conclusion that was true and non-trivial, said the law of comparative advantage. Another Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman. I apologize to Tom Woods for approvingly citing Paul Krugman. Says if there were an economist creed, it would surely contain the affirmation. I understand the principle of comparative advantage. Krugman also says part of our creed is I advocate for free trade. All right, I know that Dr. Wittner covered all of this with Harpo and Chico trading beef and mangoes, but let's look at briefly at Ricardo's numbers. They're often called Ricardo's magic numbers. If you Google this, all sorts of articles will pop up. But Ricardo's numbers are that he's talking about England and Portugal. England can produce a given amount of cloth. Using the labor of 100 men and can produce a certain amount of wine with the labor of 120 men. Portugal requires the labor of 90 men to produce that same amount of cloth and only 80 men to produce wine. Portugal uses, it's just a single input model. There's only labor. He's only concerned with the labor theory of value here. Portugal, in a sense, in the absolute sense is better at producing either product requires less labor to produce wine and less labor to produce cloth. But if we think in terms of comparative advantage, Portugal has a comparative advantage in the production of wine and would benefit by specializing in the production of wine and importing cloth from England, both countries would benefit. Gottfried Hobbler, who is Austrianish, I guess, at some point, anyway, he has a great book. It's Must Reading for Austrians, I think, interested in this topic. His 1936 book, The Theory of International Trade. Rothbard's copy of this book is, most of the book is underlined, page after page, every line being underlined. But Rothbler developed our modern formulation of this law in terms of real opportunity costs, instead of the labor theory of value. So every once in a while, in international economics, you'll see the word Austrian, and they'll be referring to Hobbler's formulation of the law of comparative advantage. Hobbler is, I'm gonna go off track, I think. Hobbler is a somewhat Austrian. In the book, Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, he writes one of the essays. But then by 1974, in his 1974 book, he sounds Keynesian. And there's a bit of Keynesianism in his 1936 international trade book. All right, this is the way we usually explain it at the principles level, something like this. Let's see here. No, you can't see that. Let's try this one. That's a little better. So here we have England's production possibilities curve for wine and cloth. If England produces wine and cloth efficiently, they'll end up with some combination of wine and cloth, say at point A. If they specialize in the production of cloth and trade, export some cloth and import some wine, they'll end up on this consumption possibilities curve, this red line, they'll end up with more wine and cloth than they could have had if they don't trade with Portugal. England doesn't have to have more capital. They don't need to be smarter. They don't need to work harder. Just by simply trading with Portugal, they end up with a higher standard of living. But these arguments do not tell us that these arguments by themselves do not tell us that free trade is good. So far we've just said trading is better than not trading. Free trade, trade is better than autarky. That's all we've said so far. And people like Hobbler and the other book that his must reading for Austrians is by Leland Yeager and David Turk in 1976. They have a great book on this. And both of them, they don't stop with Ricardo and Smith. That does not end the debate over free trade. You have to, I'll show you today. It's more complicated than that. But we can use this argument to make a case for free trade. We can use Ricardo's argument to make a case, a case for free trade if we make certain assumptions. So suppose we assume the terms of trade are favorable for both countries. The red line that I'll show you is favorable for both countries. Ricardo just asserts that it will be. He doesn't explain with any economics why that would occur. He just makes that assertion. And as far as I know, no one's explained it in terms of Austrian price theory. It's an open avenue for investigation here. But for today's purposes, let's assume the terms of trade are favorable for both countries. Let's assume that the tariff does not affect the terms of trade, a false assumption in some cases. Let's assume that trade is balanced. So within Ricardo's formulation, if you have a massive trade surplus, you may be worse off trading than not trading. So Ricardo gets around this by talking about gold flows. He said trade will be balanced because if you have a massive trade surplus and you're exporting lots of goods and not importing very much, gold will flow into the country, your prices will go up and eventually trade will more or less balance. So eventually you'll have gains from trade because of gold flows. But that argument doesn't apply today. There's no gold flowing in and out of the country. We also assume that capital and labor are perfectly mobile within a country. There's no pain in labor markets as workers move from one industry to another. Austrians are sort of middle of the rotors on this issue. So we don't think labor markets are perfect, but we're not Keynesian on this issue. We don't think there's a terrible lot of friction. And importantly, we have to assume that capital and labor do not cross international borders and other false assumption here. Of course, those things happen today. All right, this is sort of how we explain it using the principle of comparative advantage. So here we have the red line shows the consumption possibilities curve. If there's free trade, England ends up at point C here with this combination of wine and cloth. If they protect their wine industry, they produce at point B prime. They produce less cloth and more wine. They trade up along this blue consumption possibilities curve. The lines are parallel indicating the terms of trade are the same regardless of whether or not there's a tariff. And so they end up on a lower consumption possibilities curve, say at point C prime. So some trade with the tariff is preferable to no trade economically, but free trade is preferable to the tariff. All right, some of the arguments for tariffs are so weak. And these are oftentimes the arguments you hear the most. We can just stop here and demolish those arguments more or less. So let's do that. Krugman calls this a playing dirty. He says that your opponents, the protectionists often engage in errors of logic and fact. And he says you can demolish them. And he says Krugman says, this is playing dirty and I advocate it strongly. All right, so we have this common argument that tariffs lead to more jobs. It increases our employment. If we protect the steel industry, we have more jobs in this country. In the steel industry, if we have a tariff on sugar and have high sugar prices, we grow a lot more sugar beets in this country, even though it's a terribly inefficient way to get sugar. And it's true that the tariff does lead to more jobs in the protected industries. But we can easily, I think, counter this argument. If you create jobs in one industry, you lose jobs in another industry. If you protect the English wine industry, jobs are created, but where do those workers and where does that capital come from? It comes from the cloth industry. So you lose jobs in the cloth industry. And Paul Krugman, I'm citing the Krugman stuff before 2000. So in the last 20 years, Krugman is arguing with early Krugman on lots of issues here. But anyway, when discussing this particular argument, Krugman says, constant employment is a reasonable approximation. So he's saying labor markets more or less adjust. Even if it's not painless, the adjustment occurs and we shouldn't buy into this argument. Hobbler, by the way, sort of in 1936, sort of there's the inklings that he's buying into this. He's talking about the friction in the labor market. And in Murray Rothbard's copy of the book, that's all underlined and in big letters in the margin, it says, aha, exclamation mark. I don't know, did he catch Hobbler? I don't know why it says that. And then by 1950, Hobbler writes an article or writes and builds a formal model showing that in the face of the frictions in the labor market, a tariff might be preferable to free trade. At least he can model it. All right. And then there's a series of arguments that basically say either imports are bad or low-priced imports are bad. We can sort of lump all of these arguments together. There's arguments, a series of arguments saying that low-priced imports hurt us either because the low-priced imports are either due to cheap foreign labor. So because wages are low in other countries, they sell us low-priced imports. Our workers have trouble competing with this labor, so goes the argument. And they will have to lower their, accept lower wages to be competitive, ignoring the fact that wages are largely determined by the amount of capital per worker, ignoring this Austrian position. And then sometimes the low-import prices are just due to firms dumping their products at our markets in order to gain market share. So either way, the argument is low-priced imports hurt our businesses and our workers, and we need to protect ourselves from these low-priced imports, say, with a tariff or some other trade restriction. But within the law of comparative advantage, low-priced imports are good. It's a, they lead to a better terms of trade. If Portugal would sell England lower-priced wine, England wouldn't have to export as much of its cloth. It could import more wine. It would end up with more wine and cloth. So we can use Ricardo's principle here to counter this argument. I'll show you a diagram on this in a moment. But the other, another argument that's really sort of in the same category is the argument that we need to protect ourselves from a trade deficit, that the trade deficit is bad, that the benefits of trade are due to the exports, not the imports. So this is an old mercantilist position that Adam Smith demolished and we've demolished it several times over by this point. So, but this is easily countered. Really the benefits of trade are not due to the exporting. It's due to the import. By the way, if you wanna read about this, you might start with Henry Haslitz, the driver exports where he's demolishing this argument in his book, Economics of One Lesson, In One Lesson. But just ask yourselves, if we export wheat to Europe and they send us Italian sports cars, do we benefit from watching them eating their our wheat or do we benefit from sporting around in sports cars? And of course the benefits come as we get to have the sports cars. The benefits come from the imports. It would be even better if we just got to keep our own wheat and eat it. They would just send us free sports cars. And we can show this using this comparative advantage diagram here. So here the red line is the initial terms of trade. This red consumption possibilities curve. So England's specializing at point B. They're specializing in the production of cloth and they end up at point C. But if there's lower priced imports, England does not have, I mean they can import, they can export less cloth, import more wine, and the blue line represents the improved terms of trade. So we're better off with low priced imports than we are with higher priced imports. And if there's a trade deficit, that means you're not exporting as much and you're importing a lot and still you end up better off than before. And there's the additional benefit of a trade deficit is that if you have a trade deficit, then dollars have flowed out of the country and those dollars tend to flow back into the country in the terms of some type of foreign investment. Foreigners, the capital flows into the country. So you get the double benefit of having a trade deficit. All right, but there are stronger arguments for tariffs. Or at least I'm calling them stronger arguments. There are arguments within the international economic sphere that are considered to be the better arguments for tariffs. These are not the arguments I've addressed so far. And there's a lot of them. And the reason they are stronger arguments for tariffs is they admit they're against some trade. They're just arguing that the benefits of the tariff outweigh any losses due to the tariff. So you could buy into Ricardo's argument and still make the case for a tariff. And that's what they do. And you can't invoke Ricardo and refute these arguments. So in that sense, they are stronger arguments. All right. One of them is the infant industries argument. This argument goes back, I think it was first made in 1645. So it goes back, what is that, 375 years. So it's actually a very complicated issue and I can't fully address it today. But the argument is, yes, Ricardo's right. Free trade is wonderful. We just have to protect industries until they're ready to face international competition. So within this argument, industries are born somehow. That's not quite explained. And then there's an infancy period where they need protection and who could be opposed to protecting infants? Aren't we all in favor of this? And then somehow the industry matures. There's very little economics in this explanation, by the way, and then you can have free trade and all the wonders and glories of the benefits of free trade. You just have to protect the industry until it's ready for competitive pressures. All right. There's a lot of issues here. I'll just address a couple of them. One of them is the lack of sophisticated economic analysis in this argument. It's more of a biological explanation, an analogy of what's going on. So protected industries never mature. And the reason is there's no explanation for how the industry arises. There's no entrepreneur making an investment decision, expecting the present value of the future stream of profits to be positive or anything. Somehow the industry just arises. So there's no entrepreneur in this. There's no price, there are very little price theory or anything in this explanation. So industries never mature. And that's because entrepreneurs make different decisions if they're being protected from international competition, then they would if they're facing international pressure. So if you're a protected industry, the entrepreneurs in that industry build businesses that have characteristics A, B, and C because they're not facing international competition. But if you're facing international competition, you build different businesses with different characteristics. So you're never ready for free trade because you have not built businesses. Investors have not built businesses that are ready to compete. So there's no, I can't find any example where an industry said, yes, we're ready. Please, we don't need protection anymore. We're so healthy and strong. Let's have some free trade. It's just, of course they don't. I think the main issue is that there's the lack of any entrepreneur in this theory. So the infant industries people, they don't want to protect all industries. They want to protect industries that are beneficial over the life of the industry. Well, aren't those the industries entrepreneurs will fund? Entrepreneurs are willing to take losses upfront. They do it all the time in order to make profits over the life of their investment. Entrepreneurs will fund the correct industries. The industries that we want to be born and we want them to survive are the industries that don't need protection because entrepreneurs will fund those industries. Murray Rothbard makes this point. Mises also demolishes this argument, this infant industries argument. Rothbard says, in fact, if long run prospects in the new industry are so promising, why does not private enterprise ever run a lookout for a profitable investment opportunity? Enter the new field. So if it's such a great deal in the long run, of course, private investment will take care of this. We don't need protection. It's only because entrepreneurs realize that such investment would be uneconomic, i.e. it would waste capital, land and labor that it could otherwise be invested to satisfy more urgent desires of the consumers. So if you're protecting industries that investors won't fund, then you're wasting land, labor and capital. All right, another argument. I'll get to a couple more. Another argument, and this argument, oh, let me point out that within this infant industry's argument, I'm assuming the capital is coming from domestic sources. So I mean, if you fund the wine industry through protection, then it comes from English capital. Portugal is not building wine factories in England, right? It's important to make that distinction. All right, another argument is the terms of trade argument. It's called the optimal tariff argument. This argument began soon after Ricardo's book. By 1824, Robert Torrens is starting to make this argument, although he doesn't really spell it out until the 1840s. And this argument raged throughout the 1800s. So here's the argument. See, with the principle of comparative advantage, we're assuming the tariff will not affect the terms of trade. But if you're a large country when you buy a lot of international goods, the tariff could affect the terms of trade. So if you put a tariff on a product, the decreased demand internationally for that product falls, the price falls, and you have a better terms of trade. So far, the argument is this is, yeah, that's, that could happen. I mean, that's a possibility. And then, so the terms of trade people say, well, if the benefits of the increased terms of the improved terms of trade exceed any damage due to inefficiency losses due to the tariff, then you're better off with the tariff. All right, so here's the way we would explain it using Ricardo's formulation. So the red line indicates the free trade consumption possibilities curve. You know, it indicates the terms of trade between England and Portugal. England protects their wine industry. Again, they produce at point B prime instead of point B. They produce some wine. They produce less cloth, but the blue line indicates the improved terms of trade. And in this example, the terms of trade have improved so much that England doesn't export very much cloth. They import lots and lots of wine and they end up at point C prime. A guy named Humphrey has the devastating article, the article that devastates the infant industry's argument. Excuse me. He makes a lot of points. His main point is that it's just really impossible to spot this type of situation for a government official. It's just impossible to spot the tariff that would make this happen. And if you did spot it, you would have the tariff that makes this happen now is different than the tariff rate you need in a month because everything keeps changing. You know, supply and demand keeps changing. Consumer preferences change. So one of his main points is that it's just impossible for government officials to implement this such a policy. There's a lot of other arguments here. All right. Here's the argument that I think is important that is addressed in the literature, but I think it's not addressed enough. It's an argument about capital flows and foreign investment. So Hobbler in 1936 talks about this a lot. Leland Yeager in 1976 talks about this a lot. It is addressed in the literature, but mainstream neoclassical economists tend to not pay attention to this very much. So here's the argument. The argument is that if we impose a tariff on a product, then foreign investors will fund that industry to some degree. So if we protect our car industry like we did, then all the foreign car companies built factories in the Southern States in South Carolina and Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and Texas, right? So they funded the industry. Capital flowed into the country because of the protection. That's the argument that there are benefits from tariffs due to the foreign investment. And politicians, as they stumble around and talk about these things, sometimes sort of make this argument. So I think President Trump has made this argument, Obama, Bush, I think this is the argument that's being made in the political sphere. Back to Buchanan has been making this argument for a long time. In 2019, he wrote the article, Tariffs, The Taxes That Made America Great, where he made this exact argument that the reason we had so much foreign investment in the 1800s was due to the high tariffs. All right, let's make sure we understand the argument. So the first step of the argument is that if you protect an industry with a tariff, that'll increase foreign investment, capital flows to the protected industry. And that's assuredly happened. Hobbler says there's just lots and lots of examples of this. It's just, if you protect an industry, it's possible for foreigners to some degree fund that industry. All right, so that's step in the argument is irrefutable. Are there benefits from the foreign investment? Mises, time and time again, talks about the benefits of foreign investment in your economy. He just hammers this point to death. I could cite many articles, many places he talks about this. Certainly foreign investment increases your capital stock. You might look at, in 1958, he did a series of lectures in Argentina, one of them is titled, Foreign Investment. It's in the book, Economic Policy, Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. So the argument is that if the benefits from the capital accumulation exceed any damage done by the tariff, then you're better off with the tariff than you are without the tariff. The politicians that make this argument are discounting any damage to a tariff. They're only looking at the benefits. But you could make an argument saying if the benefits of the capital accumulation exceed any damage, then there are net benefits to having a tariff. See, the point here, the reason you can't use Ricardo here is Ricardo assumes the opportunity cost is domestic. So if you build up your wine industry, the opportunity cost is you have less cloth. But according to this argument, if you build up your wine industry, Portugal has a smaller wine industry. The opportunity cost is borne by the other country. This is why you can't use Ricardo to refute this. All right, there's a lot. This is a really thorny issue that I'm working on. One argument is that just because there is foreign investment in the protected industry, that does not imply necessarily that you get more capital overall. The economy is very complicated. The various industries are linked. And if you affect one industry, the effects ripple out through the economy. I ask you to remember Dr. Newman's Ham sandwich diagram. Where a simple ham sandwich, to construct a simple ham sandwich requires this massive structure of production throughout the economy. And if you change one part of it, it could change lots of industries. Haveler spends a lot of time on this in his book. So if one industry expands, other industries throughout the economy will expand and contract. And so for every industry that expands, that's an opportunity for foreign investment. And for every industry that contracts, that means we produce less of that product. That means foreigners produce more of that product. So that's an opportunity for our investors to invest overseas. So just because capital flows into one industry does not mean you get a net capital increase because capital will flow outside the country in other industries. So Haveler works through this analysis in detail. And then he says it's unlikely you get more capital. He doesn't say it's impossible. He just says it's unlikely. I think a really good argument is that tariffs are not the main determinant of foreign investment. When Mises talks about this, he's not talking about the tariff. He's talking about other institutions that encourage foreign investment time and time again. So foreign investment is largely determined by just the overall health of your economy. Foreign investors want to invest in a healthy economy. It's determined by other governmental policies, tax policies, our property rights being enforced. Is my investment going to be nationalized after a while? There's a lot of issues here. And tariffs are a small part of the decision regarding international capital flows. So just because you have a tariff, that doesn't mean you're going to suddenly have massive flows of foreign investment. Mises, by the way, in the middle of one of his discussions of capital he just throws out the line that a tariff cannot increase capital stock. But there's no explanation. I would like to accept the statement, but he doesn't explain why it can't. He just asserts it. All right, so these are some of the stronger arguments for tariffs and there are other strong arguments for tariffs that I don't have time to talk about. But we can sort of build a case against all of the arguments. And all of the arguments for tariffs generally make false assumptions and we can use this. So they're, they abstract from the real world. So one of the arguments that they almost always make when the economists build a model regarding tariffs and they say, look, a tariff might be beneficial. They always, there's always the statement in there that foreign governments are passive. And that means no retaliation. So even if you could imagine a situation where a tariff was welfare enhancing, other governments are likely to retaliate and eliminate any gains here. So the pro-tariff side just assumes this possibility away. But of course this will happen. Also, they always assume away any public choice issues. They always assume that government officials try to act in the national interest and they won't bow to political pressures. They won't cater to special interests like I talked about a couple of days ago. Paul Krugman, when talking about tariffs makes this point. Krugman used to be sort of a cautious free trader more or less, even though he wins the Nobel Prize for writing building models in favor of tariffs. But then at the end, he goes, it's pretty hard to do this in the real world. And one of the reasons he says this, he says governments do not necessarily act in the national interest. Do not necessarily act in the national interest. Do they ever act in the national interest? Especially when making detailed microeconomic interventions. Instead, they are influenced by interest group pressure. Well, of course they are. What if there was a world where other governments didn't retaliate and government officials were angelic beings resisting political pressures? Couldn't they then impose a tariff that was welfare enhancing? No. So this is similar, I think, to the calculation argument for the impossibility of socialism. It's just impossible to do this because it's just too complicated. It's impossible to identify the tariff rate that would be welfare enhancing. There's too many moving parts in the economy and things keep changing. I mean, you would have to just continually adjust the tariff. It's just, it's an impossible situation. It's like trying to allocate resources in the absence of market prices for the resources. Just like that's impossible. This is also impossible. Or like Dr. Terrell talked about regarding externalities. It's impossible to know the optimal amount of pollution or something. The information is not there. Even the entrepreneurs making the decisions, they don't know what the future holds regarding capital flows and things. All right, it's impossible for government officials to determine a protectionist policy. Free trade is implementable. You can have free trade. You can just say we have free trade. You can't have welfare enhancing protectionist policies. And Yeager, the other book you should read is by Yeager and Turk, if you're interested in this. They're not talking about capital flows. They're just making the general case for free trade here. And they say the protectionist slogan that free trade may be right in theory. This is a slogan you hear. Free trade's right in theory, but wrong in practice. Becomes more sensible when the word protectionism replaces free trade. Free trade is a meaningful, specific, discussable policy proposal. Ideal protectionism is not. That's my case for free trade. Thank you.