Want to Really Help Workers? Then Embrace Free Trade

Protectionist Barriers Won't Stop Robots from Taking U.S. Jobs

Ideas, innovation, exploration, and entrepreneurship make societies rich. When you buy something built elsewhere you are not just buying a fancy new object. You are importing ideas and innovation. When we welcome traders and merchants, with their wares and goods they exchange with ours, we trade not just goods and services, we open our minds to new ways of doing things—doing it more efficiently, more economically, and sometimes more aesthetically—breeding entrepreneurship. When we work with scientists, religious scholars, political thinkers, chefs and artists from other lands, we transform and enrich …