ABSTRACT
Export controls are as old as the institution of government itself. Americans readily recall the efforts by English monarchs to prevent the colonists from acquiring industrial machinery. Generations of American school children have been taught that woolen-mill technology smuggled to New England broke the English embargo and brought the Industrial Revolution to the New World. The adoption of a free-market philosophy in the nineteenth century posed as basic a challenge to export control policy as smuggling. Representative governments found it harder to justify to their citizens the economic burden of controlling exports in order to support other objectives. Export controls, like other government interventions in the marketplace, ought to be limited to what is necessary in order to serve high national purposes effectively. Export controls should be designed when possible, to exacerbate the problems the Soviet Union already faces in developing and applying technology in its military sector.
