Rating: 
Summary: BAD IDEAS 1.000 YEARS OLD
Review: P.Buchanan tires to defeat history, and exposes ideas one thousand years old. Protectionism is a thing of the past.
Rating:
Summary: completely fallacious.
Review: Suppose I were to observe that cigarette smokers had a high incidence of lung cancer. I would be committing a grave logical fallacy to conclude that lung cancer causes people to smoke. No one would take me seriously.And yet the central argument for Patrick Buchanan's _The Great Betrayal_ contains the exact same post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. His thesis depends on the historical "proof" that America has been economically declining since adopting more "free trade measures" (more on that later) and was very prosperous in the 19th century when there was greater protection from foreign trade. He also cites as evidence the fall of the British Empire, which collapsed upon adopting free trade measures. Because Buchanan clearly knows nothing about economics, he does not understand if the US became prosperous _because of_ protectionism or _despite_ protectionism, and he does not understand if Britain's fall from economic power was _because of_ free trade or _despite_ free trade. Here are the facts: the case for free trade is irrefutable. It would be absurd to attack it with empirical evidence, just as it would be absurd to attack a proof in Euclidean geometry with empirical evidence. If the protectionist case against free trade is true, consider this: it is also an attack against any form of interregional trade, as political boundaries are economically arbitrary, i.e. there is no separate theory for international trade. To be followed consistently it means that people would also be more prosperous if they didn't trade between states, cities, communities, and finally individuals. But this is absurd, for if you follow this line of reasoning logically, it means that people would be most prosperous if they were completely self-sufficient, which would in fact doom humanity to mass starvation and death. The simple, incontrovertible facts of Ricardo's law of comparative advantage and the division of labor affirm this. Buchanan's emphasis on trade deficits is another example of his ignorance. I have a trade deficit with my local grocery store and Amazon.com -- who cares. Does Buchanan have any understanding as to what trade is all about? Clearly not. He seems to think that if trade is not "equal" or "fair," it is bad. But the whole basis of exchange is opposite values: if you sell me a shirt, it is because I value the shirt more than the money, and you value the money more than the shirt. It doesn't matter whether or not I get that money back by selling you a toaster or whatever. And those free-trade measures...let's see. Free trade could be established with one or two sentences, and it requires no agreements because it can be adopted unilaterally at any time. These so-called "free trade agreements" are just expansion of government privilege and regulation, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is about 2500 pages. The World Trade Organization is a tool for political power, which subscribes to the economic absurdity "imports bad; exports good." It's just neo-mercantilism disguised as free trade -- the wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. These are not examples of free trade gone bad, they instead demand that the _real_ case for free trade be defended and elucidated, and not confused with the politicians' and world bureaucrats' deceptive language. I enjoy Buchanan on a social conservative level, but he is tremendously ignorant about some very important things. Go read some real economics like that "dead Austrian economist" (as Buchanan calls him), Ludwig von Mises, and stay away from this non-scientific labyrinth of fallacies. It's almost as bad as what they teach in public schools. Buchanan's dead wrong on this one -- don't worry about him and keep buying cheap goods from Wal-Mart.
Rating: 
Summary: Book is simply Great
Review: When Buchanan was on the campaign trail, he listened to people. That was one thing that set him apart from his opponents. When he saw the consequences of the loss of manufacturing jobs, he could no longer defend free trade. His response was this heavily documented book. The long middle section traces U. S. history as it relates to trade, specifically in the views of the presidents. Protectionism ran strong in American founders like Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, who maintained tariffs to compensate for the advantages other nations gained through cheaper labor, different economic and political structures, and unequal standards of living. Our founders fought for the economic and political independence of the United States, for the protection of American workers, jobs and products, not for money as an end it itself. Tariffs preceded the income tax as the primary source of revenue for the federal government. Better the tariff than the tax collector, said Lincoln, who called himself a "Henry Clay tariff Whig." Every president save one during the boom of 1861 to 1913 was a protectionist Republican. As recently as 1972, the Republican platform defended protectionism. Reagan imposed tariffs to protect Harley-Davidson from protectionist Japan. But Bush and Clinton were vigorous free traders, having supported NAFTA, GATT, WTO and the New World Order, in which unelected corporate elites decide the fates of every country on earth. Historically, free trade was the utopian vision of the Democratic party, of liberal presidents Wilson and FDR, and of European theorists like Ricardo, Cobden, Bastiat, Say, Bentham, and James Mill. These men brought religious expectations and evangelical enthusiasm to their mission-and ridicule and excommunication to dissenters. Wilson thought global free trade would bring peace, democracy, and economic equality to all nations of the world. Meanwhile his quasi-fascist policies were giving us unprecedented expansion of federal power, the federal income tax, and the First World War. But Wilson was in love with the idea, call it a dream or a vision, that free trade would someday dissolve the boundaries of the nation-state into a benevolent one-world government. It was this revolutionary aspect of global free trade that Marx applauded, along with its ability to obliterate the localism which had always been a principle of conservatism. Free trade might be a libertarian position, but I am not convinced that it is an especially conservative one. Economist Henry Hazlitt, a free trader, wrote that in free trade someone always loses, and to deny that fact is intellectually dishonest. The question is how seriously do we take the losses. Some of the numbers are alarming -- the U. S. trade deficit, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the rise of dependence on imports from 10% of GDP in 1965 to 23% when the book came out. Although Buchanan can get carried away, his essential points are sound. It is reasonable to ask of our political and corporate leaders: to whom, or what, do you pledge allegiance? And: What are the consequences of your actions and decisions in the context of national interest?
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