Letters

From the November 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

The neo-Luddites and others with radical critiques of technology deserve hard-hitting but thoughtful criticism, and the readers of REASON deserve better than what they got from you.

Dave Gross
San Francisco, CA

Enemies of Trade

I agree with Evan McElravy: The FTAA protesters in Quebec were misguided, as was the police-state response ("Enemies of Trade," July). But I find a few things in his article troubling. First, it is difficult to imagine that a responsible government would not have police in place and prepared for violence, given the earlier havoc in Seattle. Were I a property owner in Quebec, I would have been happy to have police there. That said, McElravy is right that police actions must be defined by the particular situation, not by past events.

What also troubles me is McElravy's statement, "The case for free trade has been made primarily by cretinous conservative politicians and pundits, who seldom resist ridiculing earnest youngsters looking for a better world." This is needlessly ad hominem and could easily be turned around: "The case has been made primarily by cretinous youngsters and socialists, who seldom resist ridiculing earnest conservative politicians looking for a better world." After all, it was not conservative politicians who advanced political discourse by wearing masks and walking the streets chanting "Fuck George W. Bush."

Richard Manhard
Ashburn, VA

I enjoyed Evan McElravy's eyewitness account of the Quebec protests from a non-leftist perspective. However, I feel compelled to point out one major flaw. Protesters against free trade are no less misinformed than free trade advocates. Among the few Ph.D.s in economics who have studied the issue for decades, there is no consensus. Granted, the majority of economists in the U.S. favor free trade, but that does not mean there isn't controversy. Moreover, it was not too long ago that Keynesian and Marxist economics held equal sway in the world's universities. Fifty or 100 years from now, some other school of economic thought will likely hold sway.

As we all should remind ourselves periodically, macroeconomics is as much art as science. It is much too complicated for one side in a debate to claim that the other side is completely ignorant of the facts.

David Levy
Vienna, VA

Evan McElravy replies: In response to Mr. Manhard, the week after the Quebec protest, I attended a Marxist-Leninist conference where one speaker, holding a photo of police beating protestors, intoned, "This is what their democracy looks like, this is the face of their system!" Though a malicious exaggeration from a fringe group, it augurs ominously for the future, as more and more people -- particularly young people -- seem to associate economic liberalization with political repression. In this climate, it doesn't seem too onerous to ask pro-trade voices to take the high road. Is it really useful to suggest that the officer who killed the protestor in Genoa should be feted on TV, as did a recent Wall Street Journal piece?

As for protecting property, it is a difficult balance. Worth noting, however, is that, in the exposed area outside the Quebec barricade, there was virtually no damage to private property.

As to Mr. Levy, economics may be the "dismal science," but REASON's position has always been that not only is the empirical evidence on the side of expanded trade but that, more importantly, there is no moral basis for interfering with the right of the world's people to engage each other as they please, including via trade.

I call "uninformed" the bulk of protestors whose sole source of information was interest group propaganda brochures -- not a sufficient education on the issue.

Campaign Finance

Michael Lynch's interview with Federal Elections Commissioner Bradley Smith was thought-provoking ("Professor Smith Goes to Washington," July). Unfortunately, Smith is a poor man's Captain Ahab, obsessed with two giant red herrings in the election reform debate: incumbents and advertising.

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