You might think therefore that the days of free trade are behind us in the US. Indeed, this clamor against free trade is so intense that we may soon turn to PBS and find a Requiem for Free Trade composed and performed from England by Sir Paul McCartney.
Yet, all this hype reminds me of the cartoon where two dervishes are idly sitting on the desert sands, next to their camels, and one is reading the excitable Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram and telling the other: “It says that we are in ferment again”.
The truth of the matter is that free trade is alive and well among economists, their analytical arguments in favour of it, developed with great sophistication in the postwar theory of commercial policy, having hardly been dented by any original arguments by the few economists, including Alan Blinder in today's debate, arrayed against it.
marketing@alchempro.com
