free trade

Chinese economic liberalization has been responsible for the biggest mass movement out of extreme poverty in human history.

The prospect that the US president would conclude that tariffs cause growth has always been the downside of good economic numbers.

We’ve oft written about the abject phoniness that poses as “free trade” in Washington, D.C.

What do Democrats plan to do with the tariff economy they themselves helped create?

Listening to the rhetoric coming from the Trump Administration, it would be easy to assume that America’s balance of trade deficit is causing market misery and economic harm to the people of the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When now-President Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene, one of the ways he made a name for himself was by ridiculing many of the trade deals the United States has spent the last several decades cutting.

The United States is an $18-trillion-Gross-Domestic-Product-800-pound-gorilla in the global trade room. We have leverage to burn when it comes to cutting deals. We have thus far used…none of it.

We are in the midst of marking the centenary of the First World War, which was fought from 1914 to 1918.

Adam Smith’s central contribution to economic understanding was surely his demonstration that under an institutional arrangement of individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary exchange the self-interested conduct of market participants could be shown to be consistent with a general betterment of the human condition.

One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions.

Personal and economic freedom are under attack in the United States and in many other parts of the world. This is seen most clearly in this year’s contest for the White House. In all the rhetoric about America’s political, social, and economic problems that is heard from the lips of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, there is one phrase that is hardly ever mentioned or considered important: the liberty of the individual.

Listening to the presumptive Republican and Democratic candidates for the White House, the average voter would think that international trade and investment is a zero sum game in which there is a “winner” and a “loser.” Their economic policy assumption is that other countries are gaining at the international trade game at the expense of the United States.