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I sense a lot of mood affiliation in the title that I'm sure will earn the New York Times a lot of clicks. China is the biggest success story of free trade in the history of the world, and the contrarian take presented here is absurd to the point of silly. Liberalization is a matter of degree. You can't cherry pick a particular protectionist policy South Korea had and then say, "Oh look see they used import substitution and still had a good outcome." You have to also explain why that import substitution policy didn't ruin the Korean economy the way it did Argentina, or in an extreme example, Maoist China. And what you'll find is that they became much more liberal in other ways. If you're going to claim that liberalism doesn't matter you need to show your work. You need to show that in aggregate, countries that liberalize their economies do less well than countries with less liberal economies. But when you look at the data, you will find just the opposite: Countries that move in a liberal direction, like China, South Korea, and Chile, tend to improve their outcomes, while those that do not, like Argentina or Zimbabwe, tend to stagnate. And almost every wealthy country in the world is either highly liberalized or sitting on an ocean of crude oil. The fact that even liberal countries have illiberal policies doesn't disprove the benefits of liberalization. Most likely, Asia succeeded in spite of protectionism, not because of it. |