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A front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal captures the profound personal debasement of Left-leaning economists who have to find some way to go along with the labor-backed Democratic majority in opposing free trade.

For decades, Alan S. Blinder -- Princeton University economist, former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and perennial adviser to Democratic presidential candidates -- argued, along with most economists, that free trade enriches the U.S. and its trading partners, despite the harm it does to some workers. "Like 99% of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free trader down to my toes," he wrote back in 2001...

But now he is saying loudly that a new industrial revolution -- communication technology that allows services to be delivered electronically from afar -- will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two. That's more than double the total of workers employed in manufacturing today...

Mr. Blinder's job-loss estimates in particular are electrifying Democratic candidates searching for ways to address angst about trade. "Alan, because of his stature, provided a degree of legitimacy to what many of us had come to feel anecdotally -- that the anxiety over outsourcing and offshoring was a far larger phenomenon than traditional economic analysis was showing," says Gene Sperling, an adviser to President Clinton and, now, to Hillary Clinton. Her rival, Barack Obama, spent an hour with Mr. Blinder earlier in this year.

...he says the harm done when some lose jobs and others get them will be far more painful and disruptive than trade advocates acknowledge. He wants government to do far more for displaced workers than the few months of retraining it offers today. He thinks the U.S. education system must be revamped so it prepares workers for jobs that can't easily go overseas, and is contemplating changes to the tax code that would reward companies that produce jobs that stay in the U.S.

So let me get this straight.

First, nobody is debating this in terms of morality -- the right of every individual to trade freely with any other of his choosing. That right ought to exist independent of whether its exercise maximizes anyone's or everyone's welfare.

Instead we have consequentialist arguments, as though the debate were about what produces the most jobs or the most wealth or the most growth, or whatever. That's disturbing -- what if someone argued persuasively that, say, genocide produced the most jobs or the most wealth or the most growth, or whatever? Does that mean we should engage in genocide? Surely not -- but once we put ends in the driver's seat, what constraints are thee on our choice of means? Apparently using the tax code to seize the wealth of importers to subsidize exporters is okay. He thinks using public eduction to predict which jobs will be most secure in the future and train for them, at taxpayer expense, is okay.

In other words, he thinks that taking all the gains earned by the winners from trade and giving them to the losers is okay. Which means he thinks taking away the motivation to trade is okay. Which means he thinks that destroying trade is okay.

Tell me... is there any difference at all between an Ivy League economist and Lou Dobbs?

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