[1rudeboy]

If England, for instance, had ditched free trade and gone to protectionism at the turn of the 20th century . . . .

I may be wrong, but as long as the two of us are blowing smoke, England's economy at the turn of the 20th Century was mercantilist in nature. In other words, at the time, England was practising the sort of economics that gets Pat Buchanan all excited.

[Sam the Sham]

I may be wrong, but as long as the two of us are blowing smoke, England's economy at the turn of the 20th Century was mercantilist in nature.

You may be wrong, 1rudeboy? You are ridiculously wrong. England was free trade all the way since the end of the Corn Laws.

And obviously the decline of blue collar living standards since 1980 has everything in the world to do with the deindustrialization of America because of free trade. As superiorslots so wisely saw the symptoms of moral collapse (crystal meth, the profusion of "gentlemen's clubs") come from economic decline, just as heroin skyrocketed among urban blacks as the light industrial jobs they did were exported in the 60's.