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Two More Bits On Trade

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 Schumpeter.  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 who will soon succeed him in (the Oval) Office.

Relatedly, here’s a superb blog post by Pierre Lemieux on Frank Taussig‘s The Tariff History of the United States.  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.

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