How come that fashionable New York Times columnists are so quick to make moral monsters out of people that question the authority of global-warming enthusiasts?
Nobody seems to give a damn about another kind of denier, the free-trade denier, as >Donald Luskin complains.
Such people are in fact standing athwart 250 years of economics, and an overwhelming consensus of living economists. These protectionists are denying the enormous gains in standards of living and human freedom that are the direct result of free global trade.
When Maureen Dowd made a nasty little remark about people who didn’t agree with her about global warming she implied that the climate-change deniers were putting us all at risk.
But you can make a good argument that the free-trade deniers are far more dangerous.
There is a good argument that free trade is the one big thing that has powered the extraordinary rise in human well-being in the last 200 years, and we are talking about life expectancy as well as crude material wealth.
But free-trade deniers are allowed to write in major national publications and are accorded respect in national councils. Where’s the shame? Where’s the blame?
Of course there’s a common thread here.
The free-trade deniers and the global-warming people are all folks with a taste for compulsion. They want to take our money and spend it for us. One day they want to spend it on helpless workers. Another day they want to spend it on saving the planet.
But it is always Other Peoples’ Money. And it is always about compulsion.
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