Hypothesis: Free trade works (even if some people don’t)

EDITOR:

An excellent book by Tom Friedman, “The World is Flat,” reasons extremely well that free trade has no better com- petitor, even for those who may at some time lose their jobs to imports. Not only does he make arguments for (near- ly) every situation, but there is the fact that, in recent years, every U.S. presi- dent and every U.S. Nobel laureate in economics chimes in with support of free trade under any and every way you look at it (so far).

Albert Einstein died in his own mind an incomplete thinker. He searched for a “unified field theory,” the scientific equivalent to free trade, thumping rel- ativity with a perfect law for every set of x’s and o’s. Consider this rather odd thought - Einstein’s E=mc2 had a uni- versal constant. C stands for the speed of light, which, it was thought, can- not vary. But several years ago it was discovered that if light was passed through supercooked sodium, its speed decreased.

Ladies and gentlemen, the economic “unified field theory,” that is, free trade, may have trumped “everything” so far. The only assumption we must make, in a way, is that the world economy is perfect. Sort of like the human being or at least the human race.

LOUIS N. DETORO

Youngstown