Conclusion: Free Trade Is the Path to Knowledge, Liberty, World Peace, and Big Raises
When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.
—Attributed to Frédéric Bastiat
In May 2005, Chef Grant Achatz opened Alinea in Chicago, where he sought to “redefine fine dining in America.” It is a high-concept kind of restaurant, with cooking stations that look more like a science lab than a traditional kitchen. The modernist cuisine, I confess, is well beyond my taste and comprehension.
But within two years of its opening, the notoriously tough food critic Ruth Reichl and Gourmet magazine ranked Alinea the best restaurant in the United States.1 Achatz was already an accomplished chef before his co-creation with investor Nick Kokonas, but with the Gourmet ranking, Achatz had truly arrived.
What is perhaps less well known among gourmets and the merely gluttonous alike is that America’s best chef grew up in St. Clair, Michigan, “flipping eggs at my parents’ diner.”2 Of course, it is not about where you start. His boyhood friends laughed at his culinary dreams, but Achatz always told himself that someday he was “going to own a great restaurant, a famous one.”3 He has succeeded.
Just as Henry Ford did not wake up one day and start manufacturing cars, Achatz wasn’t born a world-renowned chef. Graduating from the Culinary Institute of America at twenty-one, he went to work for the late great Chef Charlie Trotter and then for Chef Thomas Keller of the famous French Laundry in California’s wine country. One day, Keller approached him about going over to Spain in order to learn from Ferran Adrià, chef at elBulli, then widely viewed as the best restaurant in the world.
Achatz was twenty-five and sous chef at French Laundry, which was itself one of the best restaurants anywhere. “I thought I knew food and cooking,” he recalls, but the dishes that emerged from the elBulli food “lab” left him “disoriented, surprised, and amazed. Completely blown away.” He continues,
Trout roe arrived, encased in a thin, perfect tempura butter. I shot [my companion] a skeptical glance and he immediately returned it. You simply don’t deep-fry roe. You can’t. It isn’t possible.
We popped the gumball-sized bite into our mouths. There was no obvious binder holding the eggs together, and they were still cold and uncooked! How did they hold the eggs together and then dip them into a batter without dispersing them into hundreds of pieces? And how are they uncooked? Whoa.
A small bowl arrived. “Ah, polenta with olive oil,” I thought. “This isn’t so out there. This I can understand.” But as soon as the spoon entered my mouth an explosion of yellow corn flavor burst, and then all the texture associated with polenta vanished. I laid my spoon down and stared at it with mock calm. I was astonished.
What the hell was going on back there? This is the stuff of magic.4
After three days in Spain, Achatz was overcome and inspired. “Everything was new and strange to me: the way the team was organized, the techniques being used, the sights, even the smells. Here was a new cuisine where nothing was routine.”5 He returned from Spain, and as he described it, “the urge to create outside of The French Laundry became irresistible.”6 After a stop as head chef at Trio outside Chicago, he went on to open Alinea.
Are you wondering what high-concept and inedible sounding food has to do with free trade? Everything.
Trade is about the exchange of goods, and that includes ideas. In an increasingly connected world, trade policy affects not only the price and availability of oil from Canada or manufactured goods from China, but new kinds of food and new ways of cooking food. Drive down the street in almost any U.S. city today and you’ll see restaurant signs offering international cuisines from Chinese to Mexican to Ethiopian. Even “traditional American” fare is constantly enriched by new ideas from around the world.
The blockbuster film Gravity was conceived and directed by a man—Alfonso Cuaron—who grew up in Mexico. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one of the greatest novels ever written, comes from Russia. My favorite author of fiction, Somerset Maugham, was from England. Life is infinitely enriched by openness to ideas and culture from all over the globe. American students in eighteenth-century Paris learned medical techniques that were advanced well beyond what they could have learned at home. The abolitionist politician Charles Sumner studied alongside black students at the Sorbonne and recorded in his journal in 1838 that “the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.”7
Arthur Laffer likes to explain free trade by asking whether Americans would refuse a cure for cancer because it was not produced at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Would the United States be weakened if a pill that cures heart disease were discovered in Prague?
Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington, but are the citizens of New York, Los Angeles, or Morgantown, West Virginia, worse off for “importing” Windows? What about the residents of Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo? Just as the exploits of Michael Jordan and LeBron James have created basketball fans around the world, free trade lets the Jordans and Jameses of software, food, and clothing compete to meet the needs of the citizens of the world by maximizing their comparative advantage.
Think about that for a moment. In daily life, people comparison shop locally for restaurants, computers, and clothes. Borders open to foreign goods allow us to comparison shop all over the world. Even better, everyone gets a raise with each paycheck. Thanks to global competition, no business can ever become too bold about raising its prices. With the businesses of the world competing for your trade, the purchasing power of your paycheck grows.
But isn’t the price of free trade lost jobs? Once again, the economic evolution of the world has been about unrelenting job destruction—and that’s a good thing. People no longer have to work from dawn to dusk to grow enough food to survive. With free trade, innovators can eliminate backbreaking work. They can make our clothes, computers, and phones with televisions on them so we don’t have to.
If free trade really caused hard times and unemployment, then New York and Hong Kong would stand as devastated monuments to its horrors. The wealth of these cities, which import almost everything, is a sign that trade enriches people.
Remember that no act of saving ever detracts from demand. What is saved is either lent out or invested in businesses focused on creating the next gadget, restaurant, and healthcare cure. Open trade increases people’s purchasing power, allowing them to save more. Saving is the only path to individual wealth, and entrepreneurs cannot be entrepreneurs without access to savings.
Free trade also brings peace. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has famously noted that no country with a McDonald’s in it ever invaded another country with a McDonald’s in it. When trade is free, producers around the globe have a rooting interest in the success of the countries to which they export. They’ll prefer trading with them to fighting with them.
War closes markets, destroys wealth, and brings tragedy to families. When people are unable to expand their sales to foreign countries, the horrors of war, at least in the near term, are less repellent, since war with a closed country does not cost anyone customers. Trade brings people together as they exchange products, ideas, and cures for lethal diseases.
Most of all, trade is about liberty. People go to work to produce what they need to trade for unmet personal wants. When governments impede trade, they make that work less worthwhile and deny people the freedom to seek the best product and best price irrespective of national origin. Free trade is about our right to exchange with anyone without answering to politicians. If that doesn’t deserve our support, what does?