Free Trade

In No Apology, Mitt Romney makes free trade a load-bearing plank of his growth agenda, while being candid about its distributional cost. His core formulation: “Trade is good for the nation and for the average citizen, but it is decidedly not good for everybody.” He pairs this with a blunt verdict on the alternative — “Protectionism stifles productivity” — and warns that “the siren songs of protectionism and isolationism have taken down some very impressive empires” over the centuries.

Romney frames the only durable response to foreign competitive advantage not as walls but as Innovation: “The only successful way to overcome foreign advantage… is to create an advantage of one’s own—to innovate,” and where a competitor’s advantage looks permanent, to “choose new paths and new products.” Free trade sits in his enumerated “growth agenda” alongside low taxes, dynamic regulation, educational achievement, investment in research, and energy security. He couples his support for open trade with a demand that America’s intellectual property — “ideas, discoveries, inventions, patents, designs, and trade secrets” — be protected and properly compensated, noting that much of it “is simply stolen by companies in other nations.”

Context: Free trade is the policy of reducing tariffs, quotas, and other barriers to cross-border exchange. The standard economic case rests on comparative advantage — that specialization and exchange raise aggregate welfare — while acknowledging concentrated losses for workers and industries exposed to import competition, the distributional tension Romney highlights.

Where this appears

• No Apology — a load-bearing theme: trade benefits the nation but not everybody, protectionism stifles productivity, and innovation (plus IP protection) is the right answer to foreign advantage rather than trade barriers.