Russell Roberts's Blog, page 202
December 6, 2021
On Hayek’s “Kinds of Order in Society”
My most-recent column for AIER is the first of a two-part series on my favorite of all of F.A. Hayek’s lesser-known papers – namely, his 1964 paper “Kinds of Order in Society.” A slice from my column:
Among the assumptions at the foundation of this article is that we human beings extend our ability to achieve our goals by cooperating with each other. And the greater is the number of individuals with whom we cooperate, the greater is the number of goals that we can successfully pursue.
This fact explains the omnipresence of human cooperation. Such cooperation began eons ago in small hunting and gathering bands in which each individual personally knew those with whom he or she cooperated. Today, this cooperation literally spans the globe and occurs among billions of people, nearly all of whom are strangers to each other.
When the cooperation is only among individuals who know each other personally – that is, only among a very small number of persons – it’s easy for each person to comprehend the nature of the cooperative arrangement. For example, John, Steve, and Sven agree to go out together at dawn to hunt, while it’’s understood by all that Sarah, Sally, and Sue will remain by the tents and prepare a fire for cooking.
No prehistoric social scientist was necessary to discover and reveal the nature of such simple cooperation – to theorize about how it arose and what purposes it serves.
But cooperation on such a small scale doesn’t allow individuals to achieve as much as each can achieve by including in the cooperative effort more individuals. The inclusion of more individuals brings to the cooperative effort not only additional muscle power but, far more importantly, additional and more diverse brain power – that is, more human creativity. The inclusion of more individuals also encourages greater specialization, which in turn results in each task being done more expertly, more uniformly, and faster.
The human mind, however, isn’t evolved to be able to know more than a few hundred individuals. If we cooperated only with individuals we know, the span of our cooperation would remain extremely narrow and, hence, the results of our cooperative efforts would be correspondingly meager.
Fortunately, our inability to personally know more than a handful of fellow human beings is offset by our instinct to adopt and follow rules. By following rules we can, and do, increase the number of individuals with whom we cooperate beyond the number that we personally know.
An example is trade, which has at its base this rule: Each person is entitled only to what other people voluntarily give to him or her. No one gets to take other people’s stuff without their permission. Under this rule, if Jones wants some item, say an axe, owned by Smith, Jones understands that he can get this axe only by persuading Smith to give it to him. And especially if Smith is a stranger to Jones, the most obvious way for Jones to persuade Smith to give him the axe is for Jones to agree to give some other item – say, a barrel of beer – to Smith in exchange.
By following this simple rule – “Each person is entitled only to what other people voluntarily give to him or her” – each of us can cooperate with strangers. Jones doesn’t have to know Smith, or to personally work with Smith to produce the axe, in order to gain (to “profit”) from Smith’s ability to produce axes. Likewise, by following this rule, Smith doesn’t have to know Jones, or to help him brew beer, in order to gain from Jones’s ability and willingness to brew beer.
Trade allows each of us to tap into the unique talents, interests, and endowments of our trading partners, be they neighbors across the street or strangers across the ocean. And trade is possible because its most basic rule is easily understood by every human being regardless of cultural background.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Don’t bank on infrastructure bank”
In my column for the October 5th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I warned against falling for the promises politicians were then making for an “infrastructure bank.” You can read my column beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
They are trying to save grandma, but grandma’s fate is sealed. What is actually happening is they are paving the way to routine universal mandatory vaccination. The political establishment intends to make “the unvaccinated” second-class citizens, to dehumanize them and deny them basic rights many generations have taken for granted. This conditions the population to movement restrictions based on behavior. Compliance gets you rights, like a dog earning treats.
Reason has been stalwart over the past year in combating Covid Derangement Syndrome.
el gato malo reminds us that “health agencies were not always deranged.” A slice:
never forget this.
they knew before 2020 than none of these interventions worked, that their prices were insanely high, and that they should never be undertaken.
they knew the dangers of vilification and polarization.
standing pandemic guidelines vehemently warned against any of this and especially against making pariahs of the infected and cultivating exaggerated fear to drive compliance.
this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was some sort of video game.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Edward Hadas digs deeply to uncover the cause(s) of lockdowns. Four slices:
There are two possible families of explanations for this litany of fearful failure, which has continued for almost two years.
i) It was justified. The threat to public health from Covid-19 was in fact so great and continues to be so great that it is worth sacrificing everything else for the effort to fight it.
ii) Neither the system nor the social values were as strong as previously believed.
The first type of explanation is completely unpersuasive. In March 2020, there was no good reason to ignore the established procedures of dealing with pandemics. The disease was undoubtedly frightening, but those procedures were created exactly to help the responsible officials respond calmly and realistically to frightening diseases.
Even if the panicked emulation of Chinese repression could initially have been justified, it was clear by June 2020 that such measures were disproportionate to the danger posed by Covid-19. By then, deaths in the first wave had peaked and were declining in most countries. Calmer scientists were persuasively arguing that Covid-19 would settle into the typical pattern of infectious viruses – becoming less dangerous as the population’s immunity increased and evolution led to more contagious but less severe variants.
In addition, treatments for all sufferers improved significantly and estimates of the case fatality rate steadily fell. Initial panic cannot explain the continued copying of formerly unthinkable policies. Something more was going on.
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Among non-traditional liberals (non-libertarians in the American vocabulary, non-neoliberals in the European discourse), enlightened despotism has often been considered the most appropriate form of rule for the development of positive freedom. The imposition of oppressive public health rules for the good of the people whose lives are being disrupted can be described as supposedly enlightened despotism.
The “supposedly” is needed, because the enlightenment is imaginary. Indeed, the fervent commitment to anti-Covid lockdowns suggests an all too typical authoritarian inability to use available knowledge wisely and an equally typical tendency to exercise more force than any outside observer would consider enlightened.
There is the second political explanation. Rather than thinking of intrusive restrictions as manifestations of the desire for authoritarian rule and rulers, the anti-pandemic expansion of government bureaucracies into everyday private life can be explained as the latest step in the expansion of what can be called the Intrusive State.
States have increasingly subsumed and tamed rival authorities (churches, families, businesses), while encouraging subjects/citizens to consider the State to be the ultimate judge of the people’s good. They exercise their power primarily through rational, extensive, and basically competent bureaucracies, in which moral standards are optional. (For people interested in social philosophy, the idea of the State’s seemingly expansion is Hegelian, the preeminence of bureaucracy is Weberian.)
The Intrusive State is generally quite popular with the people whose lives it increasingly controls. Most people seem to crave the State’s protection, especially when they feel threatened. Indeed, their respect for their governments is so extreme that they readily believe that the State should and can control natural phenomena, including highly contagious viral respiratory infections. The intrusively ruled people are very happy to participate in the processes of control, so they willingly obey the State’s commands to suspend their normal economic and social lives.
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The mastery of nature: Hubristic modern cultures are to some extent based on the premise and promise of achieving every greater human control over nature. From that perspective, it is easy to believe that the inability to keep people from dying in a viral pandemic is a sign of scientific and governmental failure. Because “saving” lives carries so much cultural weight, it appears reasonable to destroy the quality of many lives in order to delay the deaths of even a relatively few people.
The campaign for Zero-Covid is bad science, but it fits well the desire to treat the virus as a military-style enemy that is expected to surrender unconditionally to human willpower. Lost years of school, deaths of despair, emotional distress, and even deaths from untreated conditions are mere collateral damage in the battle to ward off this natural disorder.
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Perhaps the worst aspect of the response to Covid-19 is the precedent it sets. Barring a revulsion of the scale that produced Germany’s multi-decade reeducation programme after the fall of the Nazi regime, most people in the Western world will accept that the authoritarian-biopower-purification responses were reasonable in 2020-2021 and will remain reasonable in the future.
Such a grand revulsion is improbable, as there seem to be no brakes on any of the deep historical, cultural, and spiritual forces that lead to authoritarian governments, random exercises in bio-power, and anti-scientific purity cults.
This time last year, Professor Neil Ferguson observed how China’s draconian anti-Covid restrictions had influenced the response to the virus across the Western world – not least the UK. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said the epidemiologist, dubbed Professor Lockdown. But after Italy shut down “we realised we could”.
When Covid-19 first emerged as a global pandemic in early 2020, Prof Ferguson had assumed, like the vast majority of government advisers, that severely restricting freedoms would be deemed unacceptable by the British public. Controlling where people go and who they meet was seen as a non-starter in a liberal democracy. How wrong that turned out to be. Not only did people accept the lockdowns, but there was a level of enthusiasm for them – and a level of derision for those who questioned them – that astonished those of us who had thought that the UK was a nation committed to liberty.
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Meanwhile, the costs of lockdowns have become far harder to ignore. The fact that GPs made hundreds of thousands fewer suspected cancer referrals during the pandemic, in part due to fewer face-to-face consultations, was last week highlighted in a National Audit Office report. The impact has been “devastating”, says Macmillan Cancer Support, given related delays in the treatment of life-threatening conditions, including among the young. The relentless focus on Covid, the NAO concluded, means that by March 2025, some 12 million people – around a fifth of the UK population – could be on an NHS waiting list, caught in the lockdown-related treatment backlog.
The “lives versus livelihoods” debate which characterised previous lockdowns – in which those who opposed restrictions were damned as selfishly concerned solely with the health of the economy – is therefore being exposed as the nonsense it always was. The damage done to children’s mental health and education when schools close is now undeniable – which is why Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza yesterday pleaded with ministers to keep schools open. The tragedy of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, murdered by his stepmother, has also highlighted the pressure lockdown puts on vulnerable households.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 124 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, superb 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism:
In a system of innovative dynamism, creative inventors will finds ways to reduce global warming, and innovative entrepreneurs will find ways to adapt to it. Besides the risks of global warming, there are other countless risks that are conceivable – for example, the collision of a large asteroid with Earth. Many of the conceivable risks seem unlikely in the short term, and in any event we do not know how, or currently have the resources, to counter them all. Whatever small subset of the conceivable future risks actually occur, we should trust our future selves, and our descendants, to have the entrepreneurial nimbleness to deal with them. IN addition to our trust in their entrepreneurial nimbleness, they will also have the new goods and process innovation tools that we will have created for them.
DBx: Yep. But this message is unwelcome by people who seek to rule others, or who embrace a dogmatic faith in the powers of coercion.
December 5, 2021
Some Covid Links
Despite the rising fashion of “national conservatism” among the right, I suspect that the stars for American deregulation are indeed aligning as we speak. A politician today could loudly promise lots of deregulation – and win. Furthermore, he could fulfill his promises – and win again. Topping the list of potentially popular deregulation:
1. An immediate end to all Covid rules. No more mask mandates – not in schools, not in airports, not on planes. No more distancing. No more Covid tests. No more travel restrictions on anyone. (The “anyone” phrasing is how you free foreigners, as well as natives, without calling attention to the fact).
2. An immediate end to all government Covid propaganda. No more looping audio warnings at airports. No more signs or stickers. Indeed, a national campaign to tear down all the propaganda that’s been uglifying the country for almost two years.
Variants gain an advantage in two ways: first, by increasing transmissibility and, second, by evading pre-existing immunity. Both the delta and omicron variants clearly evade neutralising antibody responses which can temporarily prevent infection. This gives them an advantage even if they are not significantly more transmissible than the variants they replace. Indeed, they could succeed even if they were less transmissible.
It is a shame that these well-established principles of evolutionary epidemiology appear to have been disregarded by the majority of the scientific community.
…..
It is time that we acknowledge that the way in which we aggressively implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions – underpinned by multiple lockdowns – caused extensive collateral damage when there were better ways to protect the vulnerable. Yet we remain wedded to the same means of responding to any new potential threat.
We must regain a position of compassion – one that is in line with the social contract.
It may therefore be useful to consider how we have managed the threat of influenza. We do not, when we detect new mutations in influenza, lock down borders and force school children to wear masks and eat lunch in the freezing cold. We do not take away jobs and ostracise those who have elected not to take the influenza vaccine. We remember that we do not want anyone to tell their children that there is only baked beans on toast for supper just to protect ourselves from the risk of dying from influenza.
David McGrogan identifies a foundational problem with mask mandates.
Some letter writers to this newspaper have pointed out, with great generosity of spirit, a similarity between today’s requirement for mask wearing with its threat of prosecution and fines, and the legal enforcement of wartime blackout, the suggestion being that this is a quite small inconvenience which we should not begrudge. The experience of all out war has been implicitly reinforced by government ministers with their description of the virus as a “silent enemy” which must be “defeated”.
This metaphor, useful as it might be to politicians who adore the image of themselves leading their countries into battle, is seriously misleading. It is a good example of what an earlier generation of Oxford philosophers called a “category mistake”. Wars eventually come to an end – usually definitively. One side is defeated, the other is victorious. Sometimes, in more contained local conflicts, the outcome is ragged and there is residual fighting on disputed borders or guerilla resistance to occupation. But with the great global wars of the last century (to which this pandemic is being compared) there was a defined, identifiable finality of outcome. The losing side not only submitted to public humiliation – and in the case of Nazi Germany, to prosecution by a world court – but generally sacrificed its right to re-arm or wage any form of military aggression for the foreseeable future: an edict which could be policed by international law. This was the objective to which all of those civilian sacrifices were dedicated and there was no question of what counted as the ending.
Presumably you can see the difference between that sort of struggle which was a literal confrontation with a knowing enemy, and the present “battle” with a virus which cannot decide to surrender – because it cannot decide to do anything. Covid is not a sentient being: it has no malign intentions or devious tactics even though politicians often talk as if it did, thus adding to the air of superstitious fear. Like any virus, it has only the evolutionary imperative of all living organisms to survive and replicate.
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Even supposing that Omicron turns out to be a more transmissible but less dangerous form of the virus, allowing the new restrictions to be rolled back pretty quickly, the precedent has been established. Personal liberty is no longer a right. It is a conditional privilege which can be recalled whenever current circumstances which are (unlike aerial bombardment by a military enemy) hazily defined, uncertain in their effect and only barely understood, seem to indicate a possible need.
In the true spirit of national emergency, members of Parliament – with a few honourable exceptions – have accepted this shift in our constitutional arrangements with scarcely any resistance. The Government is now permitted to seize powers that would have been unthinkable even during a war. If it’s any consolation, European Union member states have gone much further. But the whole point of the EU was to install benign oligarchy in place of chaotic, potentially irresponsible democratic government so that should come as no real surprise.
Covid hysteria can be hazardous to your health.
Phil Magness reports on someone still advocating for the straw man.
Some Europeans have the courage and good sense to protest Covidocratic tyranny.
el gato malo reveals the truth behind the propaganda peddled by Australia’s Covidocracy.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 8 of Bruce Caldwell’s Introduction to the 1997 collection of some of F.A. Hayek’s essays and papers (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), Socialism and War (footnote deleted; link added):
[Ludwig von] Mises’s reasoning was straightforward. In a market economy, entrepreneurs choose from among innumerable possible combinations of factors of production in an attempt to find the combination that minimizes their expected costs. They do this in an attempt to maximize their profits, which is the difference between revenues and costs. This self-interested search for the best combination helps to guide resources to their highest-valued uses, an outcome beneficial to society as a whole. Because of the multiplicity of production-goods and the fact that production takes place through time (during which all manner of changes on both the demand and the supply side of the market might occur), the task is not an easy one. Entrepreneurs are aided in their deliberations by the money prices attached to the factors which reflect their relative scarcity. But in the socialist state no such prices would exist. Socialist managers would not have recourse to price signals to tell them which factors are relatively scarce and which are relatively plentiful: they would be left “groping in the dark”. The results were plain to see: “Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.“
DBx: Yes. And note that problems begin to arise the moment the pricing system is obstructed, as is done with tariffs and subsidies. With few such obstructions, the problems are few; these remain hidden by the enormous dynamism and prosperity produced by the largely free market. But the greater the number and severity are the obstructions of the pricing system, the greater are the problems.
The problems are most extreme, of course, when the obstructions of the pricing system are most extreme – for example, in full-on socialism. But the Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism, although initially aimed at the many advocates of full-on socialism (who were numerous in the first half of the 20th century), does not become applicable only when the discussion is of full-on socialism. The Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism is more general: it is a criticism of government obstruction of the pricing system – a demonstration of the marvels of the pricing system and of how it elicits and makes use of dispersed knowledge, and a corresponding explanation of the problems that inevitably arise whenever that system is obstructed.
Advocates of industrial policy cannot legitimately declare that the Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism is irrelevant to their schemes. That criticism is, in fact, highly relevant – and devastating.
[Pictured above is Ludwig von Mises.]
December 4, 2021
Some Covid Links
UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers talks to a former prisoner of Australia’s Covid-internment camp.
We study targeted lockdowns in a multigroup SIR model where infection, hospitalization, and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young,” the “middle-aged,” and the “old.” Our model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter protective measures such as lockdowns on the more vulnerable, old group. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the old both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups.
This speed of transmission is what keeps throwing the world for a loop; moreover, it seems indisputable in retrospect that we squandered our best point of leverage by failing to focus on protecting the elderly and those at highest risk.
Indeed, so much of what we became hysterical about—mask wearing and vaccine hesitancy as applied to the low-risk—was a poor substitute for communicating about and acting on distinctions in risk.
The worst part is we knew better on day one, but political imperative did not favor realistic communication about risk or prioritization.
Another Wall Street Journal columnist writing recently about Covid is Kimberly Strassel. A slice:
The White House on Thursday released its latest list of Covid rules in anticipation of a rise in winter cases and the arrival of the Omicron variant. The administration imposed new testing rules for international travelers, extended its transportation mask mandate, and announced it would launch hundreds of vaccination clinics and a campaign for boosters, distribute 25 million free tests, and allow reimbursement for home testing.
Feel better now? Confident that this time we’ll whup the virus? Of course not. If there’s one thing a weary world has realized, it’s that there’s no beating a highly transmissible respiratory disease. Vaccines prevent serious disease, but they don’t stop transmission. No amount of masking, social distancing or locking down has stopped the surges of the past six months, including in states like Michigan and New Mexico, which boasted about their restrictions. The virus doesn’t follow executive orders.
But the Biden administration hasn’t worked this out. The White House has instead created for itself a toxic Covid loop. With each new surge it rolls out more restrictions and actions. With each failure of these measures to beat the virus, the public loses faith. Cue yet more administration rules that are designed to restore confidence, even as they are destined both to fail and to annoy the country.
(DBx: From my perspective, the country isn’t getting annoyed as fast, as fully, and as furiously as it should.)
Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille rightly decries the latest round of “pointless travel restrictions” imposed in response to the omicron variant. Three slices:
We’re long past the point in the COVID-19 pandemic when politicians are doing much more in response to viral scares than engage in rituals to soothe a fearful public and enhance their own power. With the new omicron variant spreading across the world, travel restrictions seem to be the response of choice because they’re politically popular. Never mind that closing borders is ineffective at anything other than further burdening already hobbled families and economies. The actual danger posed by omicron remains uncertain, but the policy response is as pointless as it was preordained.
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Official reaction seemed crafted more to further separate families and impoverish an already troubled world than to address a bug that was already loose. Health experts make exactly that point.
“Travel restrictions may play a role in slightly reducing the spread of COVID-19 but place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods,” the World Health Organization’s Africa office warned as travel bans proliferated. “If restrictions are implemented, they should not be unnecessarily invasive or intrusive, and should be scientifically based.”
The warning that restrictions on movement carry their own costs and aren’t particularly effective isn’t new; health experts said the same thing years before COVID-19 appeared when they considered ways of slowing the spread of new varieties of flu.
“The results of our systematic review indicate that overall travel restrictions have only limited effectiveness in the prevention of influenza spread,” according to a 2014 article in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. “Only extensive travel restrictions – i.e. over 90% – had any meaningful effect on reducing the magnitude of epidemics. In isolation, travel restrictions might delay the spread and peak of pandemics by a few weeks or months but we found no evidence that they would contain influenza within a defined geographical area.”
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Stopping the spread of the virus in the U.S. with restrictions on travel from elsewhere would be quite a feat given that omicron is already here. But public officials gain office by winning elections, not assessments of logical reasoning. So, we get not just bans on travel from a subset of countries where omicron was detected early, but new testing requirements on anybody else who might want to visit from overseas. We’ll also get the consequences of new curbs on trade and travel.
Now who could have predicted this?
Robert Freudenthal warns of the “medicalised objectification of humans.” A slice:
The pandemic has turbocharged this process of medical objectification. We are no longer individuals, with unique desires, responses, wishes and drives, but rather are primarily considered by policy makers to be infection risks. Once we are primarily objects, rather than diverse human beings, it then becomes legitimate for medical procedures to be mandated, mask wearing to be forced, or our movements to be tracked and traced.
Steve Templeton decries the destruction by Covid panic of communities.
Sabine Beppler-Spahl reports on Germany’s “lurch into Covid authoritarianism.” A slice:
Indeed, the new Covid measures run counter to much that voters were told only a few weeks ago by leading figures in the SDP, FDP and some Green politicians. During the election campaign, they led people to believe there would be no compulsory vaccination programme and that they were opposed to nationwide lockdowns. The FDP, in particular, won the support of many younger people by promising more liberty and freedom. ‘We Free Democrats’, its manifesto declared, ‘place our faith in freedom, the rule of law and civil rights, which apply even in times of crisis and must not be dismissed as “privileges” to be allocated or withheld from us at will’. Grand words now betrayed by authoritarian actions.
Speaking of Germany, el gato malo compares that country to Sweden.
But at least what these children will suffer from isn’t Covid-19!
Laura Perrins is outraged at Ireland’s masking of eight-year-olds. A slice:
Have you noticed this concept of ‘resilience’ is frequently used to justify adult and governmental abuse of children? Close the schools: the kids are resilient. Mask the kids: they are resilient. Scrap the nativity play for a second year in a row: it will build the resilience. Very rarely are adults asked to be resilient, but children are.
Kat Rosenfield warns of “Anthony Fauci’s dangerous narcissism.” A slice:
But the result is not just oddly religious, but perverse. Unlike actual science, which is one of the most vital truth-seeking mechanisms we have, this “science” is utterly incurious, hostile to questions, incapable of admitting fault. And while this would be an alarming development at any time, it’s especially bad amid a global catastrophe in which it’s never been more important to stay humble and ask questions, even if they’re politically inconvenient, even if they make powerful people bristle at your insubordination.
We can try to blame Anthony Fauci for this: for accepting the accolades, for licensing his bobblehead likeness, for letting us call the vaccine the “Fauci ouchie,” for buying wholesale into the myth of his own infallibility. But while Fauci may be at fault for getting a bit too high on his own supply, he didn’t appoint himself to this position; we did, when we decided to make him the Science Daddy without whose say-so we can never live normal lives again.
For two years, a frightened populace has looked to Fauci for the answers to impossible questions, for a sense of control amid the uncertainty, for assurance that we’re on the right side of history — even though nobody can tell us exactly what went wrong. We made science a civic religion, and we told Fauci he was the Pope. Unfortunately, he believed us.
In response to a lockdown fundamentalist, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
Given the devastation wrought by lockdowners on the working class and poor, they face two choices:
1. Admit their hypocrisy and repudiate lockdown, or
2. Smear the people who pointed out the cruelty and folly of lockdowns with defamatory lies.
This guy chose option 2.
Quotation of the Day…
… is a response that F.A. Hayek – in May of 1945, after a talk that he delivered in Washington, DC – offered to a question about tariffs (as quoted on page 20 of Bruce Caldwell’s splendid Introduction to the 2007 Definitive Edition [Bruce Caldwell, ed.] of Hayek’s classic 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom):
If you have any comprehension of my philosophy at all, you must know that one thing I stand for above all else is free trade throughout the world.
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