 Hi there. My name is Don Boudreau. I'm a professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at George Mason's Mercatus Center, and I'm here today to talk about Adam Smith and his views on trade and the economy. So let's get started. I often tell my students, I actually tell my students this all the time when I talk about Adam Smith. You know, Adam Smith dies in July of 1790. I often say if you go to the Canninggate-Kirk cemetery where he's buried in Scott in Edinburgh, if you were to somehow resurrect him and dust him off and give him a half hour or so, become acquainted with modern discussions about trade, in one way he would be, he'd be a startle at the world that he finds himself in in 2020. But one part of it wouldn't surprise him at all. He would be familiar with all of the discussions about trade that's going on. None of the arguments used today are new. They're all arguments that Adam Smith knew, and most of them he explicitly debunked in the wealth of nations. And so there is nothing new under the sun. It always amuses me, it often amuses when I'm reading protectionist apologies and listening to protectionist arguments that many of these people think, you can tell they think they're offering some sort of new insight that no one had thought about before. Well, you know, we need high tariffs in order to protect workers in this industry because that industry might be vital for national defense or that industry might be economically strategic or there may be spillover effects or, you know, what about the trade deficit? All of these arguments were arguments familiar to Adam Smith. They were arguments that the mercantile started to spew centuries ago. So there are no new arguments under the sun. They just keep getting, the only thing that changes is the particular countries. So when I was in college 40 years ago and up until about 20 years ago, the big scary Bette Noir country was Japan and Japan was going to ruin us. James Fallow heard a book called I think looking into the sun. And so we were going to be overwhelmed by the Japanese and their brilliance with industrial policy. And it turns out to look at what made Japan rich, it wasn't industrial policy, Japanese industrial policy, they did use industrial policy. But I think the consensus, the consensus now is pretty much that the industrial policy held Japan back to be even welfare headed, not used industrial policy. Japan's great successes come not from the industries that were supported by METI, the Japanese industrial policy or government agency. Japanese, the Japanese economy grew despite it. So now people are worried about China. So when did China start to grow? China started to grow only after it adopted market policies. China under Chairman Mao was a terrible place. No one was worried about China taking over the world. It was it was they couldn't it couldn't be feed it some people. Mao dies. The Chinese economy is liberalized and China starts to flourish. Under current President Xi, the the it's not hasn't moved back fully to where Mao was, thank goodness, but it's becoming more totalitarian. And what will happen, I am absolutely certain is that the Chinese economy will become less dynamic and that will be a detriment mostly to the Chinese people, but also to the rest of us in the world. But the story that people are telling now, what we fear, oh, the Chinese are using industrial policy. See how brilliant those Chinese are. They aren't just letting things, they aren't just letting the market work. They have they have a scheme called China 2025 to to, you know, grab world markets by 2025. Governors have always had schemes to do things, five year plans of this, 10 year plans for that. They never work. The thing that markets grow when and to the extent that markets are free. Markets do not grow when and to the extent that they are clamped down by protections, policies and other schemes to prevent entrepreneurs and businesses and consumers from following market signals and being guided by market prices and guided by profits and losses in the market. There is no way that officials, I don't care how smart they are, I don't care how much power they have. There's no way that government officials can outsmart the market process. They can tamp it down, they can mute it, they can throw dirt into its gears. They can throw steel filings into its gears. They can destroy it, but they can't outsmart, they can't outperform it. History knows no example of that happening. But people are always worried that it will happen and hence people always have this notion. Well, well, maybe this time we can get it right. But pre-COVID right up until February of 2020. American society and the American economy, the American standard of living for nearly all Americans was better than, higher than it has ever been in history. And part of the reason is because we had trade that was freer today than it had been, freer up until 2018 than it had been in the 70s. And it was freer in the 70s than it was in decades earlier. What we have seen since the end of World War II has been a gradual decline of tariffs. There have been other trade interventions that have spiked up, countervailing duties, things of this sort. But by and large, the world economy over the past 75 years has become freer. And that has redunded to the benefit not only of people in poor countries, it certainly has redunded to their benefit. It's redunded also to the benefit of people in rich countries, including Americans.