Suppose someone invented a pill that let you live to the age of 120 in perfect health and then die painlessly.

That pill would put a lot of people out of business.

It would be bad news for doctors and nurses.

It would be catastrophic for medical insurers.

It would throw millions of home care staff out of work.

But would anyone see those as good reasons to ban it? And would

anyone care where the pill had been invented in their country or someone else's?

What goes for that pill goes for any other product that would

improve our lives. We shouldn't make things harder to obtain simply on the

grounds that they originate somewhere else.

Actually, a lot of people disagree with that idea.

Opponents of free trade, and there are many, say things that sound perfectly reasonable.

Things like, we need to protect our strategic industries.

We can't survive these expanding trade deficits.

We must grow our own food.

We want trade to be fair. We can't compete with slave wage economies.

All those arguments sound like common sense, but all of them would ban our miracle pill.

All of them would leave us poorer.

Let's take them in order. Protectionism. Trade barriers don't protect industries.

They make them inefficient, uncompetitive, and dependent on state handouts.

As Ronald Reagan put it, instead of protectionism, we should call it destructionism.

It destroys jobs, weakens our industries, harms exports, costs billions of dollars to consumers and damages our overall economy.

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