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My son, Thomas, reminded me this morning of this great clip from The West Wing in which Pres. Jed Bartlet (who is a Nobel laureate in Economics) does an excellent job making the case for free trade and creative destruction. Pres. Bartlet even mentions, by name, Joseph Schumpete [2]r. It’s distressing that Aaron Sorkin (or whoever wrote the script for this episode) has a better understanding of trade than does the current real president of the United States and the bloviating ignoramus [3] who will soon succeed him in (the Oval) Office.
Relatedly, here’s a superb blog post by Pierre Lemieux [4] on Frank Taussig [5]‘s The Tariff History of the United States [6]. A slice:
For all the talks about liberty and individual rights, America was far from being the least protectionist country in the world. Britain, where a powerful free-trade movement had developed, declared unilateral free trade (if only for a few decades) at the time when nearly unquestioned protectionism thrived in her former colony.