Unlike most advocates of tariffs in the Trump-Biden era, Alexander William Salter is willing to ask “Will Free Trade Bring Peace and Prosperity?” (The Wall Street Journal, October 29). The Rawls College of Business Administration academic even sees said peace as an admirable if uncertain goal, and acknowledges that the answer to the second half of the queston is probably yes.

Yalie JD Vance, and for that matter his high school social studies teacher debate opponent Tim Walz, could use some of that remedial Adam Smith 101. Vance puzzles over “the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own nation, that it would somehow make us better off.”  The “somehow” comes into focus when imagining US states taking Vance’s “we’re going to make more of our own stuff” mentality to heart, with New Yorkers attempting to plant vast tracts of orange groves while Floridians put up ersatz Appalachian ski slopes.

Yet Salter insists that while “tariffs … doubtless make us poorer … they can also make us freer.” The trivialization of free choice in the marketplace used to be the purview of those putting down schools of economics, from James K. Galbraith dismissing what he called the “freedom to shop”  to the book-length slam at Milton Friedman titled Not So Free to Choose. Restricting it makes us not so free, period.

Salter offers the conflicts embroiling the Athenian Golden Age and the modern United States as “counterexamples to the ‘capitalist peace’ hypothesis.” Those same cases were to Bertrand Russell exemplars of how “a recurrent product of commerce” is the need for merchants to cultivate a mindset of understanding “customs different from their own.”

The precarious balance between imperial and commercial power traced historically by Russell need not be left to happenstance.  If war persists even after “it became impossible to ruin others without imperilling one’s own investments,” as Emile De Laveleye noted regretfully in 1871, that devotee of free trader Richard Cobden was prescient to observe how “electricity had done away with distances” when it was newly generated by steam.

As to why “Europe’s economic integration didn’t stop the cataclysm of World War I,” it was the continent’s socialists who were the champions of internationalism at the time. Tom Mann noted in the March 1915 issue of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth that “the organized Social Democrats of Germany … singularly failed to practice the solidarity they had stood for;” Goldman’s autobiography stressed that non-participation by over ten million workers in that country alone would have had the effect of “paralyzing war preparations.”

Salter urges Americans “to weed out authoritarian rivals from critical supply chains.” The heavy-handedness that ultimately pushes them into rigidity and brittlenes is coming from inside the White House.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Wait, what? We’re talking about Joe Biden? Why? He’s a “lame duck.”  No matter who wins the US presidential election on November 5, he’s going home to Delaware on January 20.  His chances of asking  for, and getting, much from Congress during that two-and-a-half month interregnum are negligible.

But as head of the US government’s executive branch, what he can do is follow the laws, no matter how loudly Congress howls, absent Supreme Court intervention in support of criminal behavior.

He won’t do it now for fear of harming Kamala Harris’s chances versus Donald Trump, but once the votes are in he’s free to follow his conscience … if he still has one after decades in politics, where a conscience is a liability.

The laws I’m speaking of are Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2378d), which applies to the Secretary of State, and its Department of Defense  analog,  10 U.S.C. 362, informally known as the “Leahy Laws.”

Those laws, according to the US State Department Fact Sheet on them,  prohibit “the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”

Evidence that Israeli units have committed, and continue to commit, gross violations of human rights in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon isn’t just credible, it’s overwhelming.

Israeli forces have killed at least tens of thousands, and more likely in the 200,000 range, in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and Lebanon, since last October. Most of the dead are non-combatants, many of them children.

Israeli forces have been caught red-handed in numerous atrocities, from bombing hospitals and refugee camps to anally raping male prisoners with metal rods. Israeli politicians openly defend and encourage even that last one.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that Israeli forces are committing gross violations of human rights … and it is therefore illegal for the US government to provide one thin dime of military aid or assistance to those forces. Period.

Why hasn’t Biden already ordered the Secretaries of State and Defense to stop writing checks and shipping weapons to Israel?

Because Israel has a powerful political lobby in the US. Anything less than complete and unquestioning obedience to Benjamin Netanyahu’s every demand is a “third rail” … for politicians who face re-election.

Biden doesn’t face re-election.

And these days, the Israel lobby’s support goes mostly to Republicans. Its main intervention on behalf of Democrats is meddling in primaries to ensure “pro-Israel” Democrats get nominated in “safe” Democratic seats.

At some point, there’s going to have to be one of those “national conversations” over whether it’s really in the interests of the United States to unstintingly support a violent, atrocity-prone, ethno-supremacist regime.

That conversation is unlikely to go Israel’s way. But it has to be started by a figure of national stature who needn’t worry about re-election.

If Biden does possess a conscience, or even just desires a big “legacy” accomplishment, he’ll cut the Israeli regime off come November 6.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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