Post-floor fight cigarette
Outside the Union meeting
When the Union debates free trade, there's usually money to be won on betting that the debate will be awful. Luckily, Tom Palmer's guardian angel was on watch.
Much to the Right's surprise, the Left didn't harp on blood diamonds, plutocrats, and child labor, but rather made the point that "free trade" means more than just the elimination of trade barriers.
According to the first student rebuttal, bringing free trade to places that don't have it requires that certain changes on the ground happen first, including but not limited to: a capitalistic understanding of land ownership, ditto for understanding of labor, and trading in the mindset of subsistence farming (risk-averse) for the mindset of classical liberalism (not). In some cases, it's just a matter of offering industrialization to the people and watching them jump at the opportunity (i.e. rural workers moving to cities for better jobs), but in other cases the local population resists these changes and the government has to use force to make them (the government's incentives should be obvious). He mentioned Laos as such an example, but hell if I know.
Then there was a speech about Ivan the Terrible's destruction of Veliky Novgorod.
Next week: Paul Starr of The American Prospect!
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