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 ^[1],” Oct. 17).

Here, fiction is fact.

In his 2006 book Global Capitalism ^[2], 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 ^[3] (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 ^[4], 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.)

UPDATE: David Hart sends me this 2009 post by Paul Walker, who goes to the source that Jeffry Frieden uses for the above quotation; I see from Paul’s research that Frieden misspelled (and, hence, I misspelled) Otto’s name: he is Otto T. Mallery (not “Maller”).  Paul has more info ^[5].

Be Sociable, Share!

• ^[6]
• ^[7]
• ^[8]
• ^[9]
• ^[10]

• ^[11]
• ^[12]
• ^[13]
• ^[14]

Comments

comments