Kevin Williamson‘s latest column for National Review Online probes the growing distrust among the American populace of the benefits associated with free trade.
This situation is the result of a swirling vortex of asininity and parochial political interests, including but not limited to the facts that (1) the Left despises free trade, which is of particular concern to corporate Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will simply shrivel up and die if she manages once again to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Democratic primaries; (2) the usual meshugganah ranters convinced some elements of the Right that trade-promotion authority — TPA, the typical means by which Congress enables the president to negotiate complex trade deals — represents a dangerous sellout to the Obama administration, and that the deals under consideration would strip the United States of its sovereignty on immigration and other issues; (3) an intensifying wide-spectrum xenophobia has infected the American brain, with a shocking number of us convinced that economic interactions with foreigners, especially poor foreigners in Asia and Latin America, are bad for our country, despite a few centuries’ worth of hard evidence to the contrary; and (4) the rapid deterioration of public discourse, supercharged by social media, is making conspiracy theory the default mode for popular understanding of public-policy disputes.
It is at the moment nearly impossible to distinguish the economic thinking of Senator Bernie Sanders, the addle-pated socialist challenging Herself for the Democratic nomination, from that of Patrick J. Buchanan, within whose elegant prose lurks the illiterate primitivism of what he calls “economic nationalism,” which is to say, Juche Lite with a Virginia accent.
Free men do not have to beg the prince’s permission to buy from or sell to whom they choose, but being a free man is in bad odor just now, and a depressingly large and diverse cross-section of the political apparatus — Democrats and Republicans, unions, environmentalists, purportedly conservative populists, the ever-present rent-seekers in the business community — is lined up behind the belief that Americans ought to be permitted to buy and sell only at the sufferance of the powers that be in Washington. As a moral principle that is an affront to the American proposition; as a practical matter, the implicit belief — that Congress does such an admirable job managing its own business that it might as well manage the rest of the world’s business, too — is, shall we say, unsupportable.
