LONG LIVE FREE TRADE! DOWN WITH THE HAMILTONIANS! TO DUST "THE AMERICAN PROTECTIONIST SOCIETY"! And remember that the British restriction on the 13 colonies' free trade helped lead to The War for Independence, the Morill Tariff caused Lincoln's War, and Smoot-Hawley turned the Recession of 1929 into The Great Depression.

An' we don' need no NAFTA. It can be just 5 words: "There shall be free trade".

Amen. In the name of the FAther, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

A couple of points:-

- From the distribution of related wild plants and the variation in domesticated types, it is more likely that coffee originated in Ethiopia than in the Yemen.

- Not ALL trade worked for betterment, e.g. the slave trade, and not ALL the gains of new goods and techniques were spread by trade, e.g. the intellectual property of silk and rubber were stolen and New World crops were part of the loot of Spanish conquest.

There is a downside to trade, and it has to do with spreading things that you do not want to spread (think kudzu). Rare sicknesses that would remain isolated can spread all over (the moral from AIDS is not that you should not have gay sex, but that you can pick up very dangerous bugs the more people circulate - and that we were lucky that it was AIDS, which takes some time to transmit and not Ebola fever).

As for Hamilton, his purpose was to turn the US into an industrial nation. He succeeded. If American industry was a byword for quality until recently, it was thanks to him. Would you have preferred a country under the curse of easy riches, driven by cotton?

Jeffrey,

While you do make some good points about the benefits of trade, my morning coffee from Colombia and linen jacket from Italy being among them, it's not without its downsides, as several posters have already mentioned.

During the sixteenth century, there were thriving trades in silks, spices, tea, and other commodities; there was also a thriving trade in human beings (although Holy Mother Church to her immense credit spoke out against the slave trade from the very beginning). Not to mention the various diseases that were "traded" between the Old and New Worlds. In defense of Hamilton, though not without his faults, he at least recognized that a functioning market economy needs a legal and financial system to ensure stable credit and sound money. I highly doubt he would have approved of the shoddy fiscal and monetary policy that have landed us in the current mess!

Ultimately, trade, like any human endeavor, is flawed and cannot replace the worship due to our Lord alone! So we can praise the benefits of commerce, but always with qualifications.

On the wake of trade came the beliefs of the people we traded with (or traded the people themselves - slavery was also trade). Be in African animism that became translated into Voudun and Santeria, or be it Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, the result was a nice neo-gnostic mixture, AKA, New Age beliefs.

Hamilton's purpose was to turn the U.S. into the centrally-managed, mercantilist state he envisioned as a Federalist. Hamiltonian ideology certainly succeeded at that.

If he only innocently desired an industrial powerhouse as you say, he must never have considered that a state powerful enough to protect, subsidize, and conduct monetary policy for the benefit industry would also be the most obvious target for Marxist takeover -- the fruit of which has not only negated any supposed benefits of mercantilist policy, but also nearly destroyed productive industry altogether in the U.S.

Ryan: Since Marx was not even born them, how could Hamilton think of a Marxist takeover? Talk about an AH scenario... the kind that needs Alien Space Bats to work.

He might have worried about takeover by a monarchist potency - and he took the steps to make the US strong enough so that neither Spain, from Mexico, nor England, from Canada, nor the French, through the financial support might want to take posession of the country again...

"It is one of the great failings of the human race that we tend to regard the wealth that surrounds us as a given, something that is just part of the world that will last forever and requires no work to acquire."

Man, this describes my stay-at-home wife's mentality to a "T"! The modest wealth I've worked so hard to attain is like a puddle to her. There's always more where that came from!

It is not only the slave trade and illnesses that can be spread by free trade. (I might interject here that slaves don't consent to be traded, so "slave trade" is a contradiction in terms.) Christian ideals upholding the dignity of the individual can be spread, as can medical advances and improved sanitation and nutrition.

The fact remains all government requires extortion (taxes) and, therefore, mayhem, violence, threats of violence, surveillance and involuntary servitude. Those who oppose slavery ought to support free trade and oppose government. Government is the ultimate slaveowner.

Then again, the upside of trade is that medical advances can also be spread to areas of the world that might otherwise be doomed to needlessly suffer from totally preventable diseases (childhood immunizations, for example). Even for diseases that can't be prevented or cured, think of the improvements in quality of life that can be attained through better nutrition, medications, water purification and sanitation systems, etc. Free trade makes all of this possible by most efficiently allocating scarce resources.

What is wrong with admitting that trade has downside? do you know anything that does not have one?

Like water

People do not drown in water? Hurricanes and floods- that is water cause untold damage don't they? Are we supposed to deny it because water is essential to life?

Like fire

Will you allow your home to burn to a crisp because of the untold benefits that fire had brought to mankind? Will you get rid of the fire department?

Free traders who do refuse to see the destructive side of their god (for they worship it, against the First Commandment, to the point of believing that Adam Smith is more infalible than the Pope), fly against all common sense and all we know of the natural world.

Yes, there is a downside. Yes, we should be aware of it. Yes, we should be able to protect ourselves from it. And yes, we should not have to listen to tedious lectures as to all the good it obviously does.