Like a beautiful woman who’s unaware she’s beautiful, free trade is the unconscious crowning glory of the George Bush presidential administration. The US Trade Representative’s Office has about 200 staff and pound for pound, packs more value for us taxpayers and the work of our government than probably any other office. Its tiny staff negotiates these things, working hard 16-hour days. Amid the tons of paperwork, I’ve talked to them, and they always see the next mountain and hurdle. They talk of obstacles and frustrations. They don’t think they are any good, they worry ab out everything. They never quite think of the trail of laurels that’s perfuming the road behind them, providing wealth creation and opportunity to the multiplied effect for the U.S. and its trading partners. They just slog on and move harder.

But there they are: the free trade teams whose hard work is the crowning glory of the Bush administration. It’s something I have been saying for a long time, as the Economics section of this blog shows.

Trade with people and watch their incomes rise. Watch their private sectors expand. Watch political power evolve from those private sectors. Watch their democracies grow.

There is no better way to stomp out a tyrants and keep a nation from becoming an enemy than through the miraculous effects of free trade. Bush has pushed through about 14 free trade pacts, many of them in the Americas. It’s a thing of beauty. Suddenly, the red wave of Chavismo doesn’t look so strong when a private sector becomes empowered through free trade. It’s the most effective weapon we have against tyrants in the world today. And the bitterness with which Chavez fights these pacts is testimony to the power of free trade to destroy brutal leftist tyrants. When Chavez says he doesn’t like them, we need to realize that it’s because we are causing his dictatorship some pain.

With more than a dozen free trade pacts signed in the Bush administration, we all join hands with our friends in Latin America, Oceania, the Far East, Africa, and the Arab World. Thes pacts are largely unknown, unremarked on, a blip in the news and buried in a sea of trade terminology. Long trade speeches are ignored. These trade pacts create no dramatic pictures, provide no interesting TV stories. But free trade is the only thing that ever really works every time it’s tried and maybe only thing that George Bush has really done right.

Free trade is revolution.

Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information has a marvelous piece about it here.

Hat tip: Pajamas Media