Free trade is good. A reminder. [updated]

Getting a free-trade agreement with India over the line has been harder work than getting oil out of the Straits of Hormuz. But over the weekend it finally happened, and the agreement was signed.

It's true, as Murray Rothbard used to say, that genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty or its deformed cousin, a “trade agreement” -- all it needs is repealing our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-'dumping' laws, and other restrictions on trade. Which, to be fair, is most of what this agreement seems to offer.

A relaxation of rules, not any new ones.

Over the centuries, getting it understood that trade is good -- a win-win -- has been even harder work. It's been 250 years since Scotsman Adam Smith wrote 700 pages to explain that very point. Yet as Daniel J. Smith, Gabriel F. Benzecry point out, "Returning to The Wealth of Nations, one is struck by how little progress has been made in educating the public about sound principles, a task that must be renewed with every generation."

The Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and voluntary exchange that inspired America’s founders also laid the foundation of modern economics. Yet two and a half centuries later, persistent policy blunders — protectionist trade barriers, ballooning national debt, and stubborn inflation — reveal how far we have strayed from the Scotsman’s insights, endangering the principles upon which our republic was founded.

Protectionism is becoming so endemic once again, so normalised, that it requires a major effort to implement its opposite. It's big news when shackles come off. freedom free-trade 

The problem isn’t a lack of knowledge — it’s a failure to teach and apply enduring principles. ...

Yet even as those principles are applied we can see and applaud the results. Even as the world's population has increased rapidly, we see that the most important growth with more population is not more stomachs to feed, but more minds able to produce -- and (in Adam Smith's words) more people ready to truck, barter and trade. The very simple fact, as Marian Tupy reminds us, is that "for every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent."

For every 1% increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3% — according to @HumanProgress's new Simon Abundance Index.

In other words, when people are left even moderately free to produce, resources grow at a faster pace than the population.

It was Malthus, writing after Adam Smith, who ignored so many of his lessons and saw only the stomachs to be fed. 

The Malthusian mind never [saw] the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt.

The record is clear. Smith explained how it works 250 years ago. Let's applaud when more of it is allowed to happen.

UPDATE: Another reminder: 

It's not nations that trade. People trade.

And they will if you just get out of their way.