One of the economic arguments in favor of free trade the unrestricted flow of goods, services, and money across national borders has come from libertarian ideology.

Libertarian economists espouse laissez-faire capitalism, where the government only serves to provide a police/legal function, and possibly national defense. Under this theory, any government regulation of trade is wrong on its face, because it introduces government into the private sector. In its extreme form, espoused by Friedrich von Hayek in "The Road to Serfdom", any government intervention into the economy is collectivism, and any little bit of collectivism leads to totalitarianism.

Libertarianism doesn't do well when measured against history. The US followed a very libertarian path in the 19th century. But for various reasons, such as labor unrest, financial panics, unhealthy/unsafe living conditions, the concentration of power in the hands of a few industrialists (the so-called "Robber Barons"), Americans largely came to believe that there was a proper place for government in the economic sphere. I say "largely" because there is still a strong undercurrent of libertarianism in the US, especially among economists.

In terms of free trade, the libertarian approach, for instance, is not for the government to be proactive in preventing unsafe products like lead-based painted toys to enter the US, but for consumers to sue the vendor of those products after the damage, if any, has been done. This eliminates, according to libertarians, expensive recalls of entire product lines when perhaps only a few items are affected. The idea here is that if vendors are successfully sued by the victims, or by the relatives of the victims if deceased, they will make their products safer.

Some highlights of the criticisms of libertarian economics:

1 - It requires giving human life a value (for court judgments). In the infamous Ford Pinto exploding gas tank case, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis showing that spending $11 per car would cost more than the legal settlement at $224,000 a pop for each of an expected 50 people dying in fires caused by rear-end collisions. So Ford didn't spend the $11. (This kind of CBA often accompanies libertarian economic thinking.) Ford felt justified in making this decision. However, this kind of thing - where people die needlessly through no fault of their own - doesn't sit well with the public's sense of fairness. The libertarian response to

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