Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Reporting on the commendable efforts of the Business Council for Peace to bring young developing-country entrepreneurs to America for training, Thomas Heath appropriately opens with this paragraph: “There’s a line from the late television series ‘The West Wing’ that has stuck with me over the years. It went something like, ‘Trade between countries prevents wars'” (“Value Added: An exchange program for entrepreneurs,” Oct. 17).
Here, fiction is fact.
In his 2006 book Global Capitalism, Harvard University’s Jeffry Frieden notes that “As one of [FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell] Hull’s supporters put it, ‘If soldiers are not to cross international borders, goods must do so.'”* This wise proponent of Hull’s free-trade proclivities was one Otto Maller, a man otherwise lost to history.
It’s imperative to understand that this positive relationship between peace and free trade that Mr. Maller expressed so succinctly has long been emphasized by free-trade’s most prominent champions – as evidenced, for example, by many of the newly published letters of Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) that show him to have been as tireless and principled a campaigner for peace as he was for free trade.**
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux* p. 255.
** F. Bastiat, The Man and the Statesman, Jacques de Guenin, David Hart, & Dennis O’Keefe, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011).
(HT to Cato’s David Boaz for alerting me to the Heath column.)
