Donald J. Boudreaux: Are Free Traders Materialistic — or Are Protectionists?

Recently on Facebook, I shared my Café Hayek post titled “Lower-Priced Goods are a Blessing, Not a Curse.” I prefaced this share with this remark: “Protectionism is the theory that 10+2=6, and 10-2=16. And protectionists proudly and tirelessly defend this theory, happy to dismiss as ‘elitists,’ ‘experts,’ or ‘globalists’ those of us who point out that 10+2=12, and that 10-2=8.”

Of course, my description of protectionism isn’t literally true. And yet it does truly capture protectionism’s essence, which is the bizarre belief that a greater abundance of goods and services made available from sources outside of a nation’s boundaries reduces the supplies of goods and services available to the people of that nation, while policies that diminish the abundance of goods and services made available from sources outside of a nation’s boundaries increase the supplies of goods and services available to the people of that nation.

Dr Eric Crampton: The Iowa Car Crop

Many economists make international trade seem more complicated than it needs to be. Stephen Landsburg had a simple way of explaining it all.

Landsburg’s version goes as follows:

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Protectionism – putting own people first

I’ll come out with it straight away: I’m a protectionist. I have always been a protectionist, and will always be a protectionist. You can now assemble a firing squad.

I’m not an economist, but then as Marx correctly (for once) pointed out, economics is a sphere of political/ideological activity – which is why you’ll find highly qualified economists backing every conceivable economic system on a very broad spectrum from laissez-faire capitalism to Stalinism.

Richard Epstein: The Rise of American Protectionism

The wedge issue of the 2016 primary campaign is the rising hostility to free trade—and, specifically, to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

On the Republican side, establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio have failed or fallen behind, while Donald Trump maintains a commanding lead going into Florida and Ohio thanks, in large part, to his protectionist rhetoric. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has been veering leftward to fight off a determined challenge from Vermont’s democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, another unapologetic protectionist.