As the Cold War wound down, opinion elites discovered a new menace: "unfair trade practices." These are the subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and various regulations and business practices other countries use, which hamper the export of American goods.
Murray Rothbard had a remarkable ability to ask fundamental questions that others, even those within his own free-market camp, missed. After Rothbard touched an issue, it could never remain the same.
Voter opposition to major "free trade" agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies.
Yet despite aggressive marketing and loads of free PR, neither Honda nor Chevrolet (which sells the Geo line) could give these pint-sized Edsels away. It turn out that the views of the fuel-efficiency killjoys and the general population sharply diverge.
It was November 25, 1945, and the overpaid workers at General Motors were striking, again. Their gripe? Company profits were up, but wages were not. They demanded a shorter workweek and higher pay. Then as now, this government-backed union was using its legal privileges to stick it to consumers and employers. But there was one voice of sanity.
To the outside world, it appears that all economists agree: free trade can never be compromised. Inside, the picture is far more complicated. Good economists, preeminently the Austrian School, favor liberty across the board. Yet among the mainstream, economists who favor big government at home likely reject free trade abroad.
Randall Holcombe identifies a paradoxical feature of much public argument about economic issues. Socialism has collapsed. The Workers Paradise is no more, and even professed socialists rush to proclaim their allegiance to the market.
Defenders of the free market are often stigmatized as uncritical apologists for big business. Nothing could be further from the truth, as readers of this book will at once discover.
Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky.
Well, the Nissan Motor Corporation just proved that it can be every bit as shortsighted as any American company by giving $150,000 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. According to the new NAACP president, ex-Congressman Kweisi Mfume, the money will be used for "voter registration and education," presumably to elect more left-wing ideologues like himself.
