Well, I was thinking, it's kind of early in the morning for a serious talk, I'm impressed that everyone is here, but then I was thinking, well, you know, this is kind of a sermon, and you know, this is about when sermons normally occur, so maybe this is an appropriate time.
It's not going to be a normal sermon, best assured, but it is about religion and economics and with a whole series of illustrations from free trade.
And before I go any further, I do want to thank the von Mises Institute.
I'm very impressed with the facilities here. Jeff Tucker, Lew Rockwell, for the invitation, and I've been having a good time.
I've been enjoying the session.
I noticed the Lincoln session yesterday
was didn't quite get as far on the religion front
as I thought would have been appropriate.
I mean, it seems to me I'm certainly not the first person
to note that Lincoln was America's Christ figure.
And he died to save men's souls.
And you have to recognize that this metaphor has
I think his political philosophy is that he should have gotten it from Plato or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas.
That didn't show much awareness of Western religion.
If you look at Jesus, I didn't notice that he read a lot of philosophy books.
He was kind of born in a manger, just like Lincoln was born in a log cabin.
And so, if you're going to play in this game, you have to understand the metaphors quite well.
But anyway, to get beyond that, I will also make a few preferatory remarks.
I started getting into the subject of economics and religion in the 1980s,
and it was considered somewhat of an odd subject to study,
Although I had some fairly good reasons, I was looking at the time I was involved, I'm a professor of environmental policy,
and I've always regarded a clash between economists and environmentalists as a sort of religious war.
Fortunately, mostly in symbols and words, not in actual violence, but still it had all of that flavor.
I started getting interested in the subject in the mid 1980s and I remember that Rick Stroop, who's at the Political Economy Research Center, probably a lot of you know who he is, commented to me at the time, he said, you know, this is a strange subject but you ought to go look at Murray Rothbard because he actually writes about this subject too and he's interested and I did and actually followed up and so he was there first like he was in a lot of things
I've carried on at least, maybe not in exactly his vein, but somewhat maybe in his spirit anyway.
I did review his economic history, two volumes of his economic history book.
It's the longest I've ever spent reading a book to review it in my career.
I professed how great, I agreed to do it because I knew I would benefit from it.
and of course in this book it did emphasize the interrelations between economics and religion.
Rothbard attacked Adam Smith as a deluded Calvinist and suggested that the prominent role of labor
in his economic theorizing was due to his Calvinist propensities and of course Calvin believed that
I think there was a lot to what Rothbard said. I did, however, suggest that he could have put more emphasis. I think he underplayed the importance of Christianity and modern individualism in his commentary.
I would, however, suggest that he could have put more emphasis. I think he underplayed the importance of Christianity in modern individualism, and especially Protestant Christianity, and above all, Calvinist Christianity, and you could actually make a reasonable argument that modern libertarianism and individualism derive significantly from Calvinist roots.
If you look at, you know, I mean, who was it that cut off the head of the King of England?
Those Puritans who were the Calvinist offshoot of, they, the Puritans were the Calvinist, English Calvinist offshoot.
And of course, that showed something about their attitude towards authority that we can all sympathize with here.
but anyway to get before I get into free trade specifically I'll set it up a
little bit by talking about the subject of economics and religion which is
Rothbard was there but had but it's actually becoming rather fashionable
believe it or not in intellectual circles these days the Templeton
Foundation that the beneficiary of billions of John Templeton's money on
The stock market is putting 2 or 3 million, right now at this moment they're putting 2 or 3 million into funding studies of religion and economics.
The Pew Foundation is putting money into this area.
Recently I was asked by the Journal of Economic Literature to review a book by Rebecca Blank and William McGurn on
on Is the Market Moral, a subject that I don't think they would have, 10 years ago, it would
have been almost inconceivable, they would have asked.
Certainly it would have been very unlikely the book would have been written.
By the way, the answer was yes, but Blank is an MIT PhD who's Dean of the Michigan Public
Policy School and McGurn is the chief editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.
But that wasn't why they were asked to work on the book.
was because they're both self-professed devout Christians, blank as Protestant and McGurn as Catholic,
and they were sought out by Brookings, the Brookings Institution, specifically for this purpose,
to write about the question of the morality of the market, and then Brookings published it as a Brookings Institution press book.
Again, I suggest this is a sign of remarkable change occurring within the discipline of economics in places like the Brookings Institution.
Now among professional economists, the greatest efforts have been made to incorporate religion into an economic framework.
That is, joining a church or believing in a religion can be seen as consumer-maximizing utility behavior.
And then you can do what economists do, run a bunch of regressions and so forth, and relate variables like price and income to religious participation and types of belief.
It's basically Gary Becker applied to religion. And there's a whole host of students out there now who are getting interested in doing these kinds of things.
And the leader is Larry Yannacone, who's now at the George Mason economics department.
He's basically kind of pushing the whole field.
Now, I'm a small part of this trend myself, but my approach has been quite different.
I'm trying to incorporate economics within a theological framework of thought.
And so I'm arguing that in the writings that I've done in this area, that American economics, which is mainly progressive economics in my terminology, is a form of religion.
Of course, it's a secular religion. It's like the gospel of efficiency, as a lot of historians have referred to the progressive era.
So there's nothing about God or the hereafter, or at least nothing explicitly so, in economic religion.
And I've written a couple books on this subject, if anyone's interested.
I'll take advantage of the audience here and mention that one was in 1991,
Reaching for Heaven on Earth, The Theological Meaning of Economics.
And the other was in 2001, Economics as Religion from Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond.
and there's even a few copies of that one out there at a very cheap price if anyone
is interested in pursuing some of these ideas further.
But the first book is largely about secular economic religion before World War II and
the second is mainly after World War II.
And again, in terms of this growing interest among historians of economic thought and following
in somewhat in Rothbard's footsteps and also relating the issues of free trade since we
could call the wealth of nations in a way the Bible of free trade.
But there's been a growing interest in the religious elements in Adam Smith.
Writing in 2001 in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Lisa Hill
Paul writes that, quote, Adam Smith's social and economic philosophy is inherently theological
and that its providentialist underpinnings cannot be removed without impairing his theory
of social order.
As she acknowledges, she's following in the footsteps of one of the leading economists
of the 20th century, Jacob Beiner, who was also interested in economics, unusually so,
interested in the relationship between economics and religion, and who also argued that Smith
Adam Smith was unintelligible without understanding the theological assumptions.
Still more recently, another historian of economic thought, a fairly prominent economist,
Anthony Waterman, published a 2002 article in the Southern Economic Journal on,
quote, well the title of the article was,
economics as theology, Adam Smith's wealth of nations.
And Waterman argues that Smith's grounding of his system in the idea of nature and the workings of nature,
when he talks about nature, he really means God, or at least that's the best way to understand it.
It's not clear entirely what Smith meant sometimes, but as Waterman says in many cases, quote,
Nature is nearly synonymous with the god referred to in the Wealth of Nations as the deity.
And Waterman notes that the term nature is used 149 times in the Wealth of Nations,
natural comes up 232 times and naturally is found 272 times.
Now it's used in different senses and not always, but in many cases it's being used in a
Now, Mark Thornton met yesterday, talked a little bit about this, and mentioned there is some controversy over the real meaning of the hidden hand, and I'm sure that there are different interpretations, but these authors, and I would tend to agree with them, are basically saying that there is a hidden hand in the wealth of nations, and it's hidden because it's really the hand of God,
and that's what puts the whole thing together and makes it make sense and actually that's why it resonated in his society because Christian culture was pervasive
but yet people were having growing doubts so he kind of synthesized the Christian imagery but within a sort of a scientific set of metaphors
and that was the key to his success.
So, and if you look at what the, of course, Smith's commands of God are not found in the Bible.
They're found in his interpretation of the natural world.
So society follows, in Smith's portrayal, the laws of self-interest, which is the equivalent of gravity in the solar system,
It has a similar tendency towards equilibrium, and thus Smith has revealed the true social order of nature as Newton revealed the true social order of the solar system and of the physical world.
In fact, Smith saw himself in terms of Newton, saw himself as the Newton of society.
So you could say in this sense that Smith was the revealer of a new religion.
He had revealed the real plan of God for the world.
But it's not really a Christian God.
And so in a sense, you could call it a Christian variation or heresy or whatever,
perhaps, although I'm sure it could be interpreted in some Christian framework.
But I think it's actually a strain.
And another, again, reflecting the increasing amount
of writing on these kinds of subjects,
another intellectual historian, Peter Minowitz,
in a book which I recommend, it's a 1993 book about Adam
Smith's thinking, says that Smith is basically
non-Christian or even anti-Christian
in his explicit language.
Although he's in an understated or an implicit way borrowing heavily from Christian thinking.
Now, so this illustrated what I would say has been a common theme of the whole modern age.
A lot of the greatest intellectual figures of the age, looking back now,
and we're starting to have a little more perspective on them than we had,
took Christian themes and they recast them in secular language.
Sometimes even condemning Christianity, as Marx, for example, did, as the opiate of the masses,
even when you actually look at it now in retrospect, it clearly is a variant of Christian thinking.
And this also, you know, at least in my interpretation, you could have a lot of discussions,
explains the success of a lot of these thinkers because basically they were operating in a culture that was suffused with Christian assumptions and values,
but they were translating these, though, to a new and more acceptable, quote, scientific language.
And so in the 18th century, we saw the beginnings of this emergence of secular religion as a challenge or two,
and eventually even a victor over traditional Christianity in many forums, especially in terms of the governance of public life.
So Brousseau was one of the first and was tremendously influential, Smith came later, Carl Marx followed, produced another powerful secular religion,
Paul Tillich once described Marx as the most influential theologian in Western civilization since the Reformation.
He wasn't talking about Marx's brilliant logic, which was actually terrible,
but he was talking about a message that stirred such powerful religious emotions.
and Marxism Resonated in a Christian Civilization because it was already very familiar with
the main themes.
There's another book talking again about the development of this recent literature by an
Israeli historian, Egal Helfen, who interprets the history of communism in Russia as basically
a misguided working out of a religious revolution.
was nominally atheistic, but the underlying messages were historically Christian, as Helfand
explains, the Marxist concept of universal history was essentially inspired by the Judeo-Christian
bracketing of historical time between the fall of man and the apocalypse.
So he goes on and basically shows that the Marxist ideas as eschatological ideas had
an enormous impact even in the development of Russian society and the details of organization
and Marxist ideology.
So I've made again I'd say a small contribution to this trend and wrote about Smith a bit
In the book, Reaching for Heaven on Earth, I suggested, along with Rothbard, that there were strong elements of Calvin, but also Thomas Aquinas, and that in some ways you could interpret Smith as being a...
His magic formula was that he synthesized Calvin and Aquinas in language and metaphors that were increasingly suitable to a secular age.
Now, you could say that this is all of historical interest, especially with Smith.
I mean, maybe Smith was theological, I think there's a very strong case, but maybe his
arguments can just as well be made now without any theology.
Maybe God or no God, the market system is still the most efficient way of organizing
a modern economy.
But I question in my writing that you can dispense so easily with religion.
The full argument is in the second book, Economics as Religion, but I'll illustrate the argument
with respect to the topic of free trade, which is the assignment I have today.
I'm going to suggest that there are necessary theological assumptions in order to make the
the argument for free trade full and convincing.
That is to say, belief in free trade
has to rest on a normative foundation.
You can start off by noting that free trade
is a universalist vision.
The whole world should become free traders.
And then it'll bring everybody together
in an economic community of common bonds.
In this respect, actually, it's a bit like Christianity, which, unlike many other religions, was universalistic and sought to convert the whole world.
Other people, like the Japanese, have almost no desire to go out and convert other people to their own value system.
In fact, they want to stay as far away from other people as possible, and their preference would probably be to just be Japan by themselves.
But in the West, and also Islam, which is a biblical religion, there's a constant missionary character.
It's interesting, when the World Bank sends out a team these days to less developed countries, they actually call them missions.
And they're spreading the ideas of economic progress to the world.
So, and Adam Smith argued just that, that free trade would promote bonds of friendship and community, and this was a critical element.
And in fact, it was kind of essential to the whole enterprise, because if we look at history, you know, we see that the history of the world,
of tribes and nations, is one of war and conflict, often, you know, disastrous.
And so, in advocating free trade, you have to be assuming that somehow economic progress will cure nations of this kind of bad behavior.
Commerce will take the place of war.
We can talk about this with the illustration of the case of China, just to bring it up to a very current and practical example.
Most free traders would celebrate the widening of trade relations with China.
Not just the cheap goods for the United States, the assumption is that China is being drawn into the world community of nations.
And as China trades more and more, it gets richer and richer, we assume that China will become more democratic.
We assume it will become more cooperative and rational as a nation.
We assume that Mao Tse-Tung was an aberration that could not happen again in the new free trading in much richer China.
Now, I'd say, you know, this idea that we're changing the Chinese and their behavior in some fundamental sense as a nation is already getting rather religious.
It has overtones of salvation.
and it's making assumptions about the economic progress that go well beyond total individual utilities.
But it is basically just an assumption. We don't really know. I mean think of an alternative scenario.
China could get rich but still think that Chinese are the center of the earth and superior to all other nations.
They might build up a big army and navy.
It might then turn out that free trade had made China powerful in order to threaten the United States.
And the Marxists used to say that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him.
And maybe, you know, maybe we're creating a China which is eventually going to pose a...
We don't know. I mean, this is where the assumptions come in.
and the assumptions about economics and the effect of economics on national and individual character.
But for me, I can only promote and enthusiastically endorse the idea of building up China if I feel fairly confident that it's going to become a cooperative member of the world community of nations.
Adam Smith would have assumed that that was the case. Most free traders implicitly assume it, but we don't know.
This is part of the idea that economic progress is not only materially uplifting, but morally uplifting.
And this is, again, this Chinese example is just an illustration of one of the main themes I emphasize in my writing.
In Christianity, original sin was in the fall in the Garden of Eden.
in the Garden of Eden, in economic religion, there's another equivalent to original sin,
it's economic deprivation. Why do people lie, cheat and steal?
Economic religion says it's because of poverty. That's why China behaved so badly before,
because they were so poor, but now that they get rich, they'll become model world citizens.
And so the salvation of the world then is to eliminate material deprivation and that's where free trade comes in.
As I don't have any question, free trade is the best route of rapid economic progress.
So free trade becomes the route of moritual and spiritual uplift, if that's what economic progress does to people.
It's actually the way to banish bad behavior, or in a Christian framework, evil actions in the world, or that is to say, again, in a Christian terminology, to save the world.
But of course, we don't need a Christian god to do it if it actually can be done through economic means.
And we see these kinds of assumptions in the United States. Why do people commit crime in the inner city? Because they're poor.
We want to solve crime, we solve poverty, and everything will be fine.
And again, it's economic theology, if you want to call it that.
So I'm going to switch a bit now and look at another aspect of this,
which is also going to involve the interaction of theology or religion and free trade.
What about the effects of free trade internally in the United States?
Does free trade really make us better off?
And I'm not also talking about whether, going back to my China discussion,
whether a richer United States will be a more peaceful and cooperative member of the world community of nations,
although I know that a lot of people in Europe and around the world are wondering about that these days, looking at Iraq and so forth.
But I'm actually going to ask the question of whether the US is better just in terms of the welfare of its citizens as a result of free trade.
And I'd suggest the answer is less obvious than many economists have argued.
It only becomes obvious if you actually make some normative assumptions about progress and the benefits of progress.
And that are not really as obvious as some people have taken for granted.
So I'm not questioning that goods from China are cheaper. I mean, I go to Walmart too. I'm aware of what you get in Walmart.
But I'm asking whether, and I'm not questioning that Americans, in terms of total consumption, get more as a result of free trade.
They do, as far as I'm concerned anyway.
But my interest and concern is what you could call the cost of transition.
There's a lot of turmoil and economic upset associated with the market in general and with free trade in particular.
Even people who don't lose their jobs experience a lot of anxiety about the possibility.
And we're seeing increasing evidence in the United States that people don't like change,
Especially having to look for a new job, and maybe it's because we're already so rich.
I mean, by any previous historical standards, we're richer than king.
So, you know, maybe with the idea is that, hey, how much more do we need?
It'd be better to just have a job and have a stable situation.
So, and there's a, actually this fits into, there's a new academic field that's called happiness studies.
And it stems from Richard Easterlin, he wrote a classic article in the 1970s.
Easterlin found that as people got richer within a country, they reported significantly higher happiness scores.
That is, you feel good if you're rich, and other people in your country are poor.
But what he found, which was rather remarkable, was that when whole nations got richer, their happiness scores didn't correlate with their income.
And so, it's a rather disconcerting result in terms of free trade, since the whole point of it is to make nations richer.
But if they don't get happier, happiness was the goal that Adam Smith had in mind,
this would seem to be at least modest empirical questioning of the whole point of the exercise.
And now people have even gone to measure it. They actually have happiness scores and then they do regression analyses
And they correlate happiness with things like your income, your education, your sex, your age, and all these other things.
And so they use the best statistics which are available.
And just a recent article, 2004 article in the Journal of Public Economics says that losing a job has the equivalent effect on happiness
and happiness as gaining or losing $60,000 on average, so that means free trade is going to have to produce a lot of benefits in terms of cheaper goods, prices of goods in order to compensate for that, multiply by all the jobs that are displaced and so forth.
Interestingly, just to give you the flavor of this, they also estimate that it takes,
on average, $100,000 to make up for a divorce.
So again, it shows that change in people's lives is difficult, and any system which imposes
large amounts of change is going to have a lot of stress and strain.
There's a new book out by one of the more distinguished British economists, he's even Lord Richard Laird, published just a month or two ago, in 2005 it's called Happiness Lessons from the New Science.
Now remember, Adam Smith is basically all about happiness, when you really get down to it and how to maximize it in the world, or at least that was what he said he was doing, he was maximizing self-interest, but presumably to make you happier, to maximize your utility.
Utility is just another word for happiness, a little more formal and academic sounding.
So people are actually trying to look at this now.
But it raises points and issues with respect to free trade.
Why is free trade so great if it involves all this disruption?
And economists have certainly never made any attempts to measure the losses from the disruption
of Disruption, and to compare them with the benefits in total consumption.
They just take it for granted, that's just an automatic assumption.
You could call it an article of religious faith, that the gains overall are greater
than the losses of the individuals who lose, even though the individual losers are probably
experiencing much bigger losses than the individual gainers from the trade, at least in the short
run.
Now why is free trade so important?
Well, again, I would say it comes back to the argument I've been making that if you
believe in economic progress and that economic progress is a way to make people better and
make nations better, not just materially uplift people, but to morally uplift people, then
free trade makes perfect sense.
I mean, why worry about these temporary stresses and strain when we're on the road to affecting
the human condition or, as I put it in my first book, when we're reaching for heaven
on earth and there's some possibility of actually getting there.
So on this road, we'll want to move as rapidly as possible.
Those people who complain about being disrupted and losing their jobs, I mean, they're like
People who are evil people who are violating the religion in a certain sense, they're malingerers.
Why would anyone complain about having to bear some temporary stress if the world and
this free trading system is actually going to solve all the historic most severe problems
and other things that have afflicted the human beings in the past, such as war and crime and all kinds of other things which will gradually disappear as we maximize our material wealth.
And you can draw some parallels with Christianity in this regard.
In the Middle Ages also, the religious purpose was to get to heaven, but it was in the hereafter rather than here on earth.
Ordinary people were often tempted by easy pleasures. Sin was easy to follow.
Kings and other political leaders often ignored their Christian responsibilities.
The priesthood had to remind them of their duties and their obligations, but it is in medieval religion, and no one should reasonably sacrifice a heavenly future for a few short-run pleasures of the moment.
And like Christianity, economics always emphasizes that it's about the long run, although Keynes did say that in the long run we'll all be dead.
He was trying to actually argue with the prevailing way that most economists were thinking and
then still do in considerable part when they focus on equilibrium, for example.
That's worrying about the long run and not about how we get there and what the path is
and what the qualities of the path are like.
But that all makes sense if progress is a transcendent value.
In all of these lost jobs and other transitional costs in the short run, reasonably enough
can be ignored.
So, to repeat my point, economic progress, maybe, I wouldn't actually, I'm not really
even intending to dismiss this, maybe it's true, although I have my doubts, as you might
suspect, but I'm not saying it's wrong, it's just, I'm saying it's an article of faith.
I don't really know whether economic progress actually has all these great benefits.
There's certainly some reasons to doubt it, but there's also some reasons to believe it.
But it's an article of faith that has to go with the whole system or else the system starts to unravel.
And if economic progress is not what it's really cracked up to be,
then the case for free trade has to shift from what it's historically been presented.
It doesn't necessarily go away, but it needs at least to be modified.
Now, I think this issue is arising because for much of the 20th century, you were a bit of a crackpot if you questioned progress.
I mean, everybody took it for granted. I mean, it was part of the American religion.
I mean, Abraham Lincoln was part of this in his own way, and he symbolized it.
But now a lot of people are questioning it, especially environmentalists.
These are mostly environmentalists, and so it's not, this is part of the religious war between environmentalists and believers in economic progress as a redeeming feature of life, and it's not coincidental that environmentalists are the fervent, you know, the leading opponents of the merits of globalization.
They're not actually stupid, they're simply saying, admit, some of them are not very good at articulating, I have to admit, so maybe they are stupid, but implicitly what they're saying is that progress is not what it's cracked up to be and doesn't really redeem people, and so therefore globalization is not as important as a lot of people are suggesting it is, and when you look at things like progress, I mean people are undoubtedly influenced
Things like the 9-11 terrorist attack, I mean, it raises ambiguities about progress.
With modern science, all it takes now is a few nutcases and they can destroy thousands
of people and possibly even millions of people.
So you know, this fear that science is kind of a Faustian bargain has become much more
widespread and of course science is obviously associated with progress.
So that's sort of my metaphysical theological discussion.
I will switch gears and finish up with a few more pragmatic observations on the connection
between religion and free trade.
And again, I'll refer to an existing body of work among economists.
The economists in the 1990s got interested in the subject of social capital.
I mentioned spiritual capital being, social capital is a broader thing.
It's basically that, I mean to take a simple example, language.
A language is a form of social capital.
Nobody creates it exactly, nobody invests in it, but yet a language is a tremendously
efficient thing.
It even is tremendously beneficial to the economy.
The spread of English around the world is a form of social capital which is greatly and rapidly reducing transactions costs, but nobody planned it, nobody invested in it, it just happens and is happening.
But there are all kinds of forms of social capital and economists are saying, well, you know, we actually need to start studying the social capital as well as physical capital and human capital in the form of education.
So, maybe to have a free trading system, I mean, we need some worldwide social capital.
That's one way of thinking of it anyway.
I mean, to have a good system of free trade, property rights need to be enforced across borders,
trade agreements need to be established, cheating on these agreements needs to be policed.
There's a whole set of things that have to happen.
I mean, free trade is not world anarchy.
It's actually a managed system of markets, but with laws, arrangements, institutional arrangements.
Actually, for better or worse, John Maynard Keynes was the leading architect of the post-World War free-trading regime,
which has been enormously successful in terms of economic progress, if that's what you're looking for.
and but hopefully you know within this system most people will behave in a
reasonable fashion on a voluntary basis that is we don't have to force them by
threatening to punish them they actually believe in it and they want to
contribute to it and be part of it so how would we get this kind of behavior I
mean there are as I've mentioned before a lot of losers in trade a lot of people
People who might be angry about the results, who might protest it.
Well one way historically that you build up social capital or in this case world capital
of a social nature is through a religion, which would suggest that you need some kind
of world religious backing, again referring back to some of my earlier themes, as a normative
foundation.
Some people might prefer the word ideology, but I think that's actually religion, and
I've had arguments with people, probably some of you would argue with me, but I think religion
is the most accurate word.
And if we were going to say, what's the religion going to be that's going to create a set of
World Bond that are going to combat opportunism, to use a piece of economic lingo these days, or to maintain trust, to provide that social capital foundation for world trading.
What's the common belief system? Well, the only one I can see right now, although maybe I'm wrong, this will be my last point at the end, the only one I can see is this belief in economic progress.
So whether it's valid or not, and I have said that it's easy to wonder about it, it does seem to be the essential normative foundation right now.
and now there are, it is possible to imagine some other normative foundations the you could go back and say that God is a free trader and maybe you could find justification in the Bible and economic progress is a secular religion we might be able to find justification in traditional religion
These are the principles of free trade. I haven't really explored that subject in great depth.
I'm probably skeptical, but probably not impossible.
And in effect, what I've been suggesting is that in a somewhat secularized way,
that was essentially what Adam Smith was arguing, was that God basically had established this system.
It was the proper way of ordering relationships among human beings.
If we were worried about China, we didn't have to worry, because God knew what was going to happen, and China was taken care of in the grand plan.
And so we can rest at ease about this issue that I raised before.
And so in that vision, it wouldn't be economic progress that would protect us against China.
It would be, and its benefits and its impact on China would be a divine intervention.
So that's an option.
I guess, if you had asked me, I guess as a somewhat libertarian, although you might wonder based on all my comments here,
I guess I would argue, if I had to at this point make an argument, a fundamental argument for free trade,
it would basically come down to the principle of ordering society based on voluntary consent as individual.
And frankly, I don't care as much whether it actually produces a tremendous rate of economic progress or not.
So maybe I'm a departure in this respect.
And so it's really the principle of individual freedom and not being oppressed by government, et cetera, et cetera.
So I guess maybe you could say that I have a libertarian God.
But whether it's a Christian, economic, libertarian, or whatever,
it does seem to me that you're going
to have to defend free trade in terms
of some normative principle.
And those principles are not just scientific.
And that could be the big question for the 20th century,
as I said in here.
What God will it be?
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm trying to raise some questions about...