Did Adam Smith find protectionism a laughing matter?

By William Danzek | 13 November 2005

Dr Gavin Kennedy discusses Adam Smith's view of protectionism:

As for [Adam] Smith his writings on mercantile political economy... are among the most angry, sharply polemical and high-blown of his rhetoric that he ever wrote. He was truly an angry man when it came to mercantile policies, considering them to be near outrageous in their supposed defence of the interests of the nation, but in fact were articulating the squalid self-interests of 'merchants and manufacturers'.

Smith admitted his polemical style in Book IV was a 'very violent attack' upon the 'whole commercial system of Great Britain'. He wasn't laughing.

True, latter-day protectionists deserve a battering (intellectually) and no doubt the odd smile at their idiocies too. But to some extent we free traders are lumbered with the phoney free traders who speak on our behalf, while running some of the most destructive protectionist economies known to humankind, namely in the rabid protectionism of the EU's and the USA's agricultural sectors (to which the lunacy of subsidising cows to an extent greater than the incomes of poor farmers in the unwealthy countries of the developing world, is well made by John Blundell). Anti-free traders only have to point to EU-USA protectionism to shrug off free trade attacks as being hypocritical - which they are.

Smith and Ricardo won the intellectual argument, but politicians and the special interest groups of subsidised farmers threw that advantage away. Nobody's laughing, least of all the victims of protectionism.