Peter Whoriskey of the Washington Post visits Hickory, North Carolina, where unemployment has hit 15% due to the effect of foreign competition on the textile, furniture, and fiber-optic industries. The manager  of a state unemployment office observes: “The people in the think tanks keep saying we are going to become — what’s the term? — an ‘information and services’ economy…. That doesn’t seem to be working out too good.”

Yes, indeed — we simply must knuckle under to “the people in the think tanks.” Regarding free trade, I once asked a professor of economics — whose thinking was representative of that found in the “think tanks” — what if everybody became an itinerant? I wasn’t especially impressed by the answer — “Aw, it’d never get that bad….”

Maybe it never would get that bad — but the question was intended as a sort of thought experiment. If the result of the workings of the free marketplace was that it did get that bad — well, then, according to free-market theory, that result must be the best of all possible worlds. It may indeed bring wonderful benefits to “the consumer” — but “the consumer” is an abstraction, since most every consumer also has to work for a living, and if the economic centrifuge does not follow up your job today, just wait until tomorrow or next week….

We do indeed garner considerable benefits from international trade — up to a point. The trouble with the “think tank” people is that they leave out the “up to a point” — because they’re ideologues. A proportionate policy would balance the benefits of trade against the deleterious effects of the economic centrifuge….