Over in Virginia’s fifth congressional district, the contest between state Sen. Robert Hurt and incumbent Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello has exposed one area in which the candidates generally agree: they want to make the nation poorer by clamping down on trade.
As Hurt told the editorial board of the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
Hurt shows no compassion for the industrial jobs lost and communities devastated in Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere when their textile mills moved to places like Southside Virginia decades ago. Why did they move? The labor was cheaper and more malleable than at home…mirroring what’s happened to the region in recent years as its firms move their production offshore, where labor and other costs are even lower. But he’s running for Congress, not history professor, so we might be inclined to cut him a little slack. Or not.
That’s because Hurt also says he opposes a pending free trade agreement with South Korea…a place whose only sin is to be populated by people who are quite entrepreneurial (and home to goods that Americans just love to buy… be it computers, cars or toys).
As bad as Hurt is on trade, Rep. Perriello is much, much worse:
Because, like Mr. Hurt, Rep. Perriello simply cannot stomach the idea of those thieving Canadians taking all our jobs (I’m looking at you, William Shatner). And they also nurse grudges against free peoples engaging in mutually-beneficial exchanges (the reasons why are perhaps best left to Dr. Freud).
But beyond the free exchange of goods, and the wealth, new technologies and cheap plasma televisions trade can bring. According to George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux, trade also brings civilization:
“The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.”
Put another way, protectionism not only keeps prices unnecessarily high and not only creates unjustified special privileges for the politically powerful few. Most importantly, protectionism breeds ignorance and stupidity, two arch-enemies of civilization.
People, to the extent that they are civilized, find the very notion of protectionism to be barbarous.
Don’s formulation begs the question: are Mr. Hurt and Rep. Perriello are truly “civilized?”
Outwardly, yes. But their rhetoric betrays a more than disturbing distaste for human progress.
