After one of my articles in defense of free trade was published on LRC a while back I recieved an email from Pat Buchanan taking issue with several points. One of his arguments was that I was insufficiently concerned about the fate of “my neighbors” who, like most everyone else, must compete in global markets. Not all of my neighbors, just the ones who belong to labor unions and who want the state to raise tariffs and impose quotas to force me to pay more for the goods they are involved in producing.
It strikes me that using the state as an instrument of plunder and theft is not a very neighborly thing. Hence, I hereby suggest to Pat a different analogy: Protectionists are not the kind of neighbors one would invite over to a backyard barbecue but, rather, are more like a roving gang of thieves who break in to their neighbors’ houses while they are away at work and school and steal their valuables. Protectionism, as an implicit form of taxation, is theft and protectionists should be placed in the same moral category as thieves.
6:42 am on August 26, 2003
