Moreover, trade liberalization, trade expansion, and globalization are largely responsible for America's recent prosperity, including the 30 million new jobs created during the last ten years. The demonstrators, who might once have expected sympathetic press coverage, got little of it in 1999. A cursory examination of the WTO Web site reveals that the organization has its headquarters in Geneva, and that no other international agency currently oversees the rules of international trade. Other accounts of the famous exchange tend to omit mention of the years that elapsed between challenge and response. Buchholz's enthusiasm for a priori logic is nothing new in economics.
Expert testimony concerning free trade typically ignores an important distinction.
Theorems concerning circles, triangles, and other subsets of the Euclidean plane are indeed irrefutable. But theorems asserting that bumblebees can't fly, or that thrown baseballs can't curve in flight, are not. They may be true as they apply to particular models of a baseball or a bumblebee in flight, yet false as they apply to actual baseballs and actual bumblebees. In other words, economic principles are theorems, and theorems are irrefutable. A child can complete the syllogism.