ABSTRACT
The gloom and despondency of liberal economics notwithstanding, trade experience in the early 1980s tells us that protectionism in fact poses no great threat to the world's trade system. Even the most cursory examination of recent trends in world trade shows that while world trade, as pointed out earlier, declined only a trivial 1 percent, growth rates, output, and employment suffered a much more severe setback. The biggest issue of world politics— nuclear arms control— is generally acknowledged to be a matter of bilateral relations by the superpowers. The chief fallacies, false premises, and historical misrepresentations that sustain the liberal doctrine can be fairly briefly stated, since most of them have already been perceived and identified. The argument has both policy implications and intellectual implications. Politicians and officials need to know what the real choices are in trade matters; yet they are still apt, as Keynes remarked, to be the mental prisoners of defunct economists.
