Holllow threats.

• Author: Wooster, Martin Morse

You'd think that after 200 years of sound advice by economists, politicians would finally have figured out that free trade leads to growth, prosperity, and fortune, while protectionism leads to autarky, depression, and despair.

But it seems that the Clinton administration is determined to continue the addiction to protectionism that blighted the Republican administrations of the 1980s. And some people are calling for huge bureaucracies to pile more bricks on top of our already high tariff walls. Perhaps the most ardent trade warrior is National Journals Bruce Stokes, writing in the Winter Foreign Policy.

While Stokes does support some measures that expand trade, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, most of his proposed changes are designed to end what he calls "the ideological blind alley of laissez faire." Stokes supports President Clinton's efforts to create an Economic Security Council, and he also supports a new Department of International Trade and Industry (DITI) to oversee America's trade policies. Had this department existed in the 1980s, says Stokes, it could have given money to auto companies for research, supervised import quotas, and "required industry and labor to make sacrifices of their own, limiting wage demands, workplace rules, executive compensation, and investment options."

Stokes also wants to create a Trade Corps, a group of public-spirited civil servants who would work on "the development of common strategies on trade issues that transcend narrow departmental approaches." And to make sure that all these new bureaucracies are doing their jobs, a Congressional Trade Office would be set up to be a legislative watchdog.

One wonders why all these new bureaucracies are necessary. Surely the executives of the American car companies did a fine job fouling up their enterprises without thousands of Washington bureaucrats, most of whom have never managed a business or met a payroll, helping them push their firms over the brink. Recall also that by the single act of giving billions to Iraq in "agricultural credits," the Bush Administration trade warriors did a great deal of damage to American interests. Will the batallions of bureaucrats now based in the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. Trade Representative's Office, and elsewhere suddenly become competent just because they happen to have their own department?

But isn't national trade policy necessary before we can compete...