Content Manager, AmericanCompass.org
Sir or Madam:
In my day, I’ve read too-many-to-count error-filled screeds attacking the case for free trade. But Michael Lind’s 4,000-word dog’s breakfast of fallacies, economic ignorance, and gratuitous name-calling might well be the worst (“So What If Tariffs Are Taxes?” July 24).
If Lind were a serious and sober skeptic of free trade, a careful point-by-point consideration of his latest compendium of complaints about trade and praise for protectionism would be justified. But sometimes an author commits an error so egregious and laughable that it alone reveals that nothing that the author writes on the subject is worthy of consideration. And so it is with this line from Lind: “By the 1970s … the ‘Little Tigers’ of East Asia – South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore – were providing significant competition to U.S. manufacturing. America’s East Asian trading partners unfairly exploited unilateral access to the now-open American consumer market, the largest in the world, while protecting their own domestic markets….”
It’s true that South Korea and Taiwan were more protectionist than was America – although, as Columbia University economist Arvind Panagariya shows, the evidence is unfriendly to Lind and others who attribute the economic growth of these countries to protection. Instead, these countries grew to the extent that they liberalized.*
Lind’s howler is his inclusion of Singapore as among the countries “protecting their own domestic markets.” Wow. Since soon after its separation in the mid-1960s from Malaysia, Singapore has famously been among the world’s nations with the freest trade. As Panagariya wrote in 2001, “Singapore and Hong Kong have been the most open economies in the world during the past fifty years.”**
For further evidence – not that any is needed – I consulted the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World 2023 Annual Report. There, each country’s freedom to trade is ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being complete freedom to trade. From 1980 through 2021 (the first year and most recent year these data are available), the U.S.’s average freedom-to-trade score was 8.47; Singapore’s was 9.42. This result is due to no statistical quirk: In every one of the years for which these scores are reported, going back to 1980, Singaporeans’ freedom to trade was always higher than Americans’ freedom to trade.
That Lind apparently believes that Singapore has been a protectionist country unfairly taking advantage of freer-trading Americans tells you all you need to know about Lind’s mastery of the realities and economics of trade.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* Arvind Panagariya, Free Trade and Prosperity: How Openness Helps Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
** Arvind Panagariya, “Why did Singapore and Hong Kong Escape Protection?” June 27, 2001.
*******
This piece by Michael Lind must be read to be believed. If a knowledgeable free trader set out to embarrass protectionists by composing a comically error-ridden essay purportedly meant to defend protectionism, that free trader could do no better than to write what Lind offers here. But Lind, of course, sincerely believes himself to be oh-so thoroughly and skillfully destroying the case for free trade.
*******
UPDATE: Bob Lawson – now, since Jim Gwartney has died, the principal researcher on the Economic Freedom of the World Index – messaged me to say that data on freedom-to-trade rankings are available also for 1970 and 1975. (You can find these data here.)
In 1970, Singapore’s freedom-to-trade measure, at 7.84 (out of 10), was below that of the U.S.’s measure, which was 9.13. Nevertheless, Singapore was, in 1970, one of the world’s ten freest-trading countries, with the U.S. then being the fourth freest.
By 1975, Singapore’s freedom-to-trade measure had risen to 8.56, while that of the U.S. was slightly higher, at 9.16. In that year, Singapore was the world’s ninth freest-trading nation. [Note: The Index says that, in 1975, the U.S. was the world’s 50th freest-trading nation – obviously a typo. I suspect that the U.S. was then the world’s fifth freest-trading nation.)
Bottom line: At no time from 1970 through today was Singapore, contrary to Michael Lind’s description, remotely close to being a protectionist country.
