Here’s another letter to a now-regular correspondent.
Mr. H__:
Thanks for your email
You write that in my responses yesterday to Oren Cass I “ignore Cass’s weightiest point,” which you quote as being this:
Underlying these policy changes will be a more-fundamental shift in political economy that rejects denuded consumerism in favor of a richer conception of human flourishing. Rather than optimize solely for efficiency and cheap stuff, citizens will demand that markets foster broad-based prosperity built upon family-supporting jobs, strong communities and a robust industrial base. Capitalism can deliver on those goals if it is reoriented toward them, and that is the task now awaiting American policymakers.
I’m sorry, but this passage from Cass is a mix of ignorance, error, and arrogance.
First is his mistaken suggestion that the case for free trade is a case for the myopic pursuit of “cheap” materialist pleasures. I challenge him (or you) to find in the writings of Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, Richard Cobden, William Graham Sumner, Milton Friedman, Leland Yeager, Jagdish Bhagwati, Deirdre McCloskey, or Douglas Irwin – all great champions of free trade – the slightest evidence in support of this suggestion. You’ll fail.
Second, while there are (and will always be) some individuals who use their economic freedom to become “denuded” consumers, where’s the evidence that such childishly self-indulgent behavior is prevalent in economies whose denizens enjoy great freedom to trade? Is it found in Victorian England, which was marked by a principled commitment to free trade? No. Is it in Singapore today, which ranks as the freest-trading country on earth and also one whose citizens are among the world’s most generous in terms of making charitable contributions? No.
What about in post-war America, which Cass and you likely have in mind? Again, no. Americans’ inflation-adjusted per-capita charitable contributions doubled from the mid-1970s (when we last ran an annual trade surplus) to 2016. This generosity shot up especially fast just after NAFTA was implemented.
Third, Cass errs in yet again implying that greater freedom to trade put America’s industrial base in jeopardy. U.S. industrial capacity reached an all-time high in 2024, and was in 2017 (just before the first of Trump’s tariffs) 11% larger than in 2001 (when China joined the WTO), 62% larger than in 1993 (the year before NAFTA took effect on New Year’s Day 1994), and 141% larger than in 1975 (the year America last ran an annual trade surplus). This reality is almost impossible to square with Cass’s cartoonish depiction of people in a free-trade regime consuming irresponsibly.
Finally, who is Oren Cass to sit in judgment of how other people peacefully spend the incomes that they earn? Why is his opinion of his fellow Americans so low that he believes that, when left free to trade, too many of us do so destructively? And what strange political philosophy leads him to conclude that human flourishing is best promoted when politicians and bureaucrats constrain our freedom by preventing us from peacefully trading with whomever we choose and on whichever mutually agreeable terms we reach?
People flourish when they are free, not when they are targets of what Thomas Sowell rightly identified as “the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’” I’m afraid that Oren Cass is one of these ‘betters’ trying now, with his rampaging presumptions, to denude us of our freedom.
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
