[familyop]

"Milton Friedman thought it was good. Tom Sowell agrees. So does every other competent economist. I’ll take their opinions any day.

Case closed."

You used the bandwagon approach and a hasty generalization as substitutes for argument, then you pretended to officiate in order to order the "case closed" (a tactic that analytical men see as hostility).

We're seeing much of that in political speech. Our business and political leadership is more rapidly devolving. Maybe they should marry out with the rabble more. It's quite a strange scene to those of us, who are more American in thought than European.

[Hawthorn]

>> You used the bandwagon approach and a hasty generalization as substitutes for argument <<

Nothing “hasty” at all about my approach or my argument. The case for free trade been studied, analyzed, and empirically tested time and again since the days of Adam Smith, that is, over the past 233 years. The scientific literature on the matter is so vast that one truly could spend a lifetime reading it.

Moreover, if Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Tom Sowell are all on the free trade “bandwagon,” then that’s where I want also to be. I’m proud and happy to be in such company.

In any event, Smith, Friedman, Sowell and literally thousands of other economists have done all of the analysis and all of the argumentation that anyone could ever wish for. No propostion in philosophy or science has ever been more thouroughly vetted than has the notion of comparative advantage (or “gains from trade”), and this proposition has stood the test of time — both logically and empirically — at least since 1776.

In other words, further argumentation or explanation is genuinely unnecessary.