Ha-Joon Chang Quotes
Basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies.
Chang, Ha-Joon. Interview by Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!, 10 Mar. 2011.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
This quotation is of interest because it shows that the switching of positions by the two dominant parties on protectionism and free trade was not just an American phenomenon. Like the United States, the English conservatives on the right were for strong protectionist measures, while the left was for free trade. By the beginning of the 21st century the parties flip flopped both in the U. S. and in England.
Ha-Joon Chang is a South Korean institutional economist, specialising in development economics. Currently he is a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge. Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002). In 2013, Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.
