Ask the Protectionist

Protectionists are out in e-droves today!  My e-mail box is full of too many missives to reply to individually.  (I suspect that I should thank Ian Fletcher for bringing notice of my support for free trade to the attention of readers of the Huffington Post.  Judging from some – although certainly not all – of their e-mails, many of these persons seem never before to have encountered any arguments for free trade beyond [1] the mistaken one that free trade increases the overall number of jobs in the domestic economy, and [2] the nutty one that free trade is a policy pushed by oligarchs to enable multinational corporations to dominate the world and enslave the masses.)

Anyway, as these – what shall we call them? Huffers? – apparently come to the Cafe to find free-trade arguments that they enjoy attacking, I here offer a link to my April 25, 2009, column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review entitled "Ask the Protectionist."

There are other questions that I will likely will soon add to the list of questions for protectionists that I pose in that column.