… is from page 314 of Brink Lindsey’s 2000 essay “Free Trade from the Bottom Up,” which is reprinted as a chapter in the 2002 collection Toward Liberty (David Boaz, ed.):
And what the public sees in the often heated debates over trade policy is not a contest between true free traders and protectionists, but rather a disagreement between optimistic mercantilists and pessimistic mercantilists. The optimists, the supporters of trade liberalization, highlight the new export opportunities created by opening markets abroad; the pessimists dwell on the supposed threat of increased imports caused by opening markets here. Neither side, though, challenges the fallacious “exports good, imports bad” worldview.
