Reagan vs. Trump on Trade

The New York Post reports that Wall Street types are circulating a video (embedded below) of Ronald Reagan standing up for international free trade, including correctly calling punitive tariffs stupid.

Reagan builds more broad-based political momentum in one six minute address than Trump has built (or can build) in weeks of name-calling and chain-yanking.

Although, like Reagan himself, this video is far from perfect, it deserves wide circulation for several reasons beyond its clear explanation of why trade is good, which any intelligent adult can understand.

First, here are a couple of brief excerpts, lightly edited from an automatically-generated transcript:

Both developed and developing countries alike have been in the grip of the longest worldwide recession in postwar history. That's bad news for all of us. When other countries don't grow they buy less from us and we see fewer jobs created at home. When we don't grow we buy less from them which weakens their economies and of course their ability to buy from us.

It's a vicious cycle. You can understand the danger of worldwide recession when you realize how much is at stake. Exports account for over 5 million jobs in the United States. Two out of every five acres planted by American farmers produce crops for exports, but because of their recessions other countries are buying fewer American farm products than last year. Our farmers are hurting and they're just one group. So we're trying to turn this situation around.

We're reminding the world that, yes, we all have serious problems, but our economic system based on individual freedom private, initiative, and free trade has produced more human progress than any other in history. It's in all our interest to preserve it, protect it, and strengthen it.

Much later:

I'm old enough and hopefully wise enough not to forget the lessons of those unhappy years [the 1930s]. The world must never live through such a nightmare again. We're in the same boat with our trading partners. If one partner shoots a hole in the boat, does it make sense for the other one to shoot another hole in the boat? Some say yes and call that getting tough.

Well, I call it stupid. We shouldn't be shooting holes. We should be working together to plug them up. We must strengthen the boat of free markets ...

While I am glad that some are circulating this video, I think it is a mistake not to share it much more widely.

For one thing, this is a badly-needed remedial lesson in basic economics, and if the current President can't wrap his head around it, we need everyone else to, so that there is some hope of a united opposition to his policies now, or at least a broad understanding of how to correct for them later.

For another, this is also a much-needed glimpse of what leadership in a free society looks like. The people of a free society neither want nor need to be told what to do. A politician wishing to change course will speak to them like the adults that they are and earn their considered support by appealing to their intelligence and to their self-interest.

This works, because Trump to the contrary, trade (within or across borders) is win-win, as apparently anyone but he can understand.

-- CAV