Thea M. Lee Quotes

We need some economists to say that [trade] protectionism is not as dangerous as most economists seem to think it is.

I denounce the policy of protection as bondage.

It’s much better than shutting down trade to help people adjust to the effects of trade.

Those who whine incessantly and maintain the romantic notion of a self-contained market speak against the interests of American workers and a growing standard of living. They are trafficking in fear and promoting ignorance while advancing their own political ambitions. No great nation has ever increased its worth over time by closing its markets. In fact, history is replete with examples of closed markets leading to destructive economic consequences.

Let me say at the outset that I do not reflexively oppose international trade.

We do not wish to open your ports to foreign trade all at once.

There's a tendency in many politicians to become inward-looking, more protectionist, more nationalistic and more defensive, in the bad sense of the word.

We cannot open our markets to countries that do not open their markets to us.

Governments should not meddle with these trade issues… if we believe in free markets, then they have to be free

The first thing that any President must do to lead effectively on economic issues is to persuade the country that trade matters.

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

Before the war the trade agreements program was an instrument for defense against the epidemic of destructive and demoralizing trade warfare. Today, with the end of the great holocaust finally within sight, this same instrument is transformed into a powerful device for shaping a better world.

Most globalism opposition groups believe “that the foreign trade policy- making process was undemocratic and that it elevated global concerns over domestic ones.” Non-elected bureaucrats working largely behind closed doors were responsible for setting international trade rules that affected agriculture, services, trade-related investment measures, intellectual trade in goods; and over-saw a binding international dispute settlement process with little (if any) input from the domestic citizens and groups who would be affected by these economic rules and political mechanisms.

The developing countries are scared out of their wits now, because they don’t understand what they’re being forced to sign. The agreements are going way outside the trade issues and involve a helluva lot of things like your access to oil, your access to intellectual property and capital controls…. When I looked through the investment agreements, it was worse than reading my insurance policy for the fine print. I couldn’t make anything out of it, and I’m a reasonably informed person, a pretty smart economist as they go.

The best way to help countries around the world is to help them with trade.

No nation, rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, can escape the fundamental economic imperatives of the global market. No nation can escape its discipline. No nation can avoid its responsibility to do its part

Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Demanding freedom of access to other markets isn't protectionism, it's free trade.

[We must] teach the advocates for an open trade the folly as well as degradation of their policy.

There has always been a temptation, at times of economic difficulty, to turn inward and put up the shutters. That is when we need free trade most.

You cannot close down free trade. What you've got to do is open up markets.

Abandonment of the protective policy [tariffs] ... must result in the increase in ... idleness, and so, in proportion, must produce want and ruin among our people.

After so many historical illustrations of the evil effects of abandoning the policy of protection for that of a revenue tariff, we are again confronted by the suggestion that the principle of protection shall be eliminated from our tariff legislation. Have we not had enough of such experiments?

Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today’s rich countries, when it simply had not been practiced very much before they became rich.

Tough trade policies make good political fodder back home.