Here’s a letter to a first-time correspondent:
Mr. E__:
I’m sorry that you find Phil Gramm’s and my piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal “biased for not acknowledging Adam Smith’s skepticism about free trade.”
With respect, Adam Smith was emphatically not a skeptic of free trade. He was unambiguously a champion of it. As the great historian of economic thought Jacob Viner wrote about Smith, “The one social issue on which on which Adam Smith was a zealot was the issue of freedom of trade versus mercantilism.” No open-minded person who reads An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in full can fail to recognize the accuracy of Viner’s description of Smith.
It’s true that Smith offered a tiny handful of exceptions to the case for a policy of free trade, but these exceptions are very few (only four), very narrow, and themselves hedged with qualifications.
I suspect that you’ve been misled by modern-day protectionists who struggle mightily to conscript Smith into their ranks – or, at least, to yank him out of the ranks of free traders. But each of these efforts amounts to nothing more than offering selective, out-of-context quotations from Smith that are then interpreted tendentiously and, often, in ignorance of the meaning of basic economic terms.
If you don’t want to read all of The Wealth of Nations, read only Book IV – the part of the work devoted most fully to trade. If you do so, please write back to let me know if you still believe that Sen. Gramm and I misrepresent Adam Smith’s views on 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
