Free Trade & Trade Policy

Free Trade, Peace, and Goodwill Among Nations: The Sesquicentennial of the Triumph of Free Trade

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1996

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is justly considered one of the intellectual fountainheads of economic liberty. With a brilliant combination of logic and historical example, Smith demonstrated, like few others had up to his day, that governmental controls, regulations, and restrictions on economic freedom were the fundamental causes of ...

Foreign Workers are Good for America

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 1996

The U.S. Labor Department says the program that allows foreigners to work in this country is a "sham" because it fails to protect American workers' jobs and wages. Under the program, thousands of noncitizens work in the United States. But those workers are supposed to have "unique" skills ...

Government Should Ignore Gas Prices

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1996

Now, let's see if I have this straight: just as the economics textbooks say, when the demand for gasoline went up and the supply fell, the prices went up. So, the Clinton administration told the Department of Justice to investigate. Investigate what? It doesn't matter. Any time a politician wants to score ...

Repeal the Minimum Wage

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1996

To put it bluntly, given all the evidence we have about the destructive effects of the minimum wage law, anyone who still calls for an increase in it is either sadly lacking in economic education or is a demagogue. There's just no getting around the fact that if you use the ...

Geniuses from Abroad

by George Gilder April 1, 1996

The current immigration debate founders on ignorance of one huge fact: Without immigration, the U.S. would not exist as a world power. Without immigration, the U.S. could not have produced the computerized weapons that induced the Soviet Union to surrender in the arms race. Without immigration, the U.S. could not have built the atomic bomb ...

Close the Newport–Costa Mesa Border

by Don Hull April 1, 1996

They're coming by the carload! Immigrants from Newport Beach, California, who cross our Costa Mesa, California, border with impunity, take our jobs, eat our food, drink our liquor, and marry our women. Every day I see it. Mercedeses, Acuras, Rollses, BMWs, and Lexus crossing the border into Costa Mesa where they come ...

The Commerce Clause: Route to Omnipotent Government

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 1995

In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed a law forbidding possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of any school. The Gun-Free School Zones Act was touted as a blow on behalf of education and against violence among children. Two years later, Alfonso Lopez Jr., a 12th-grader at Edison High School in San Antonio, Texas, carried a concealed .38-caliber pistol ...

Farming on Our Own

by Deanna Dyksterhuis July 1, 1995

My husband Jerry and I are farmers in Corvallis, Oregon. We started with ten acres of strawberries on rented ground in 1961. We now own and farm 1,500 acres of riverbottom land along the Willamette River. We have grown green beans, carrots, cauliflower, table beets, black-berries, alfalfa, barley, sweet corn, ...

As Capitalism Wins, the U.S. Drops Out

by Theodore J. Forstmann March 1, 1995

American political and economic life has entered a twilight zone. As countries everywhere are embracing capitalism, the United States, unfortunately, is moving toward democratic socialism. As I travel the world, the irony could not be more profound. I've been to Mexico to talk about free-market reform, to Russia and Eastern Europe — to meet with young entrepreneurs, and all over ...

The New, New Left

by Rev. Robert A. Sirico December 1, 1994

The anticapitalist Left has devised a new intellectual attack on the market economy. The straw in the wind was a blistering article in The New York Times that appeared on May 8, 1994. The article, written by Peter Passell, was headlined "Life's Hard? Blame the Market." Like other attacks on market fundamentals, it complains about unequal income distribution. ...

The Case for Unilateral Free Trade and Open Immigration

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 1, 1994

The American people are extremely fortunate. Two hundred years ago, their Founding Fathers used the Constitution to prohibit American government officials from ever enacting trade and immigration restrictions between the respective states of the Union. This meant that the citizens of any state could buy and sell goods and services with the citizens of any other state, without tariffs ...

Clinton, Castro, and Cuba

by Jacob G. Hornberger October 1, 1994

August 19, 1994, will go down as a black day in the history of the United States. On that day, President William Jefferson Clinton began jailing Cuban refugees in an American concentration center on the American side of Cuba. It was the first time since the Cuban revolution in 1959 that ...