Scott Lincicome and his comrades at the Cato Institute have embarked on something rather audacious. (I can hear WFB say, “Can something be rather audacious?”) (He once said “very indigent,” then asked me, “Can a person be very indigent?” I thought not. Indigence is indigence.)
Anyway: Scott Lincicome and Cato have embarked on a defense of globalization: here. He and I have recorded a Q&A podcast about this and other issues: here.
“Globalization” is a dirty word, in many mouths (left and right). So is “capitalism.” So are other words. In our podcast, Scott and I talk about them, or some of them. How about “neoliberal”? What does that mean? Users of it tend to mean it as an epithet. But does it have any substantive meaning?
What about a “trade deficit”? Deficits are bad, right? Budget deficits, trust deficits. “Trade deficit” is a sly lexical trick.
Relatively few politicians today are willing to defend, or explain, free-market ideas. Rarely has something so successful — so beneficent to mankind — had so few defenders. I remember Carly Fiorina, on the stump in 2016. She was running for the Republican presidential nomination. She would talk about health care, saying, among other things, “Why don’t we try the one thing we have not? The free market?” The first couple of times I heard her say this, I almost fell off my chair.
Phil Gramm once told WFB that it was risky, at best, for a politician to bring up free trade on the stump. Why? (Remember, Gramm is an economist, who was a professor before entering politics.) Free trade benefits almost everyone, Gramm explained — and the beneficiaries don’t know it. Free trade harms a few, and they all know it. Therefore, there was little percentage for a politician in talkin’ trade. (At least in its favor.)
Thomas Sowell once quoted Robert Bork: “In a courtroom, there’s a winner and a loser.” Sowell went on to say, there are winners and losers in a free economy, too. There just are. But (big “but”): In a free economy, you don’t have to stay a loser for long.
The other day, President Biden used the phrase “win-win” in reference to the automakers and the UAW strike. Be careful when you talk about “win-win.” Many situations are; some aren’t.
I wonder whether there will be a Big Three, ere long. This is one of the topics of my Q&A with Scott Lincicome.
We also talk about China. A lot of us are thrilled with the economic rise of the Chinese people. This is one of the great stories in all history, as Sowell remarked to me, in an interview. (As he pointed out, American mothers used to tell their children, “Eat all the food on your plate. There are children starving in China, you know.”) But how can you help, or cooperate with, the Chinese people without aiding the evil dictatorship that rules the country?
So, Scott Lincicome and I talk about some fundamental things. He is an excellent thinker and articulator. Again, our Q&A is here.