Tear down trade barriers

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IN DEFENSE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM

By Johan Norberg

Cato Institute Press, $22.95,

$12.95 paper, 332 pages

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again: From Seattle to Genoa to Quebec City to Washington to Cancun, etc., at international meetings of such as the World Trade Organization or the G-8 group of top industrial nations, angry and mostly young protesters march in the streets, defy tear gas, protest global capitalism, denounce Nike, and smash store-front windows at McDonald's.

The protesters are of course innocent of the truth in an old IBM motto, "World Peace Through World Trade" or of the timeless message of 19th-century French journalist and legislator Frederic Bastiat, as invoked by our author. Said Bastiat, "If goods do not cross borders, armies will."

So, who will stand up and vindicate free trade and global capitalism? Who will answer the half-truth that our corporate CEO's, craven for profits, are giving up manufacturing in the United States and exporting jobs to Mexico and China so as to exploit cheap labor abroad?

I nominate Johan Norberg, once a self-proclaimed anarchist-protester in his teens, now a passionate, articulate crusader for spreading peace and prosperity around a fractious, war-weary world. I commend the Cato Institute for buying the American rights to "In Defense of Global Capitalism," a book making a splash in Europe, from its original publisher, Timbro, a Swedish think-tank where Mr. Norberg is a research fellow. I hail him for making his case for globalization with solid facts, statistics, bar-charts, and lots of flesh-and-blood examples drawn from his travels in Asia, Africa and Cancun.