Now here’s a good debate topic. Resolved: that Hong Kong, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland are reasonable models for determining the effect of policies if adopted by the United States.
Just as some simple examples of the differences between the U. S. and that list, with the exception of Hong Kong all of those countries have a net negative immigration rate and Hong Kong is a city not a country, for goodness sake.
The sad thing is that I agree with the premise of the Reason article that implicitly makes the claim that we can draw any conclusions at all about the effect a policy would have if adopted by the United States given its performance in Latvia. I do think that the world would be better off if every country adopted free trade. I don’t agree that the United States benefits when it adopts a trade policy to benefit a handful of sectors to the detriment of the others while our trading partners maintain mercantilist policies.
