Any schoolchild, of course, can see the folly of this logic. Such policies risk national disaster, which in this case translates into personal disaster for the policy-makers. For this reason, the lessons of Smith and Ricardo necessarily loom large in the calculations of wartime politicians. When viewed in this perspective, the contradiction becomes more understandable. So it is with government officials and international economic policy.
Peace reduces their personal costs of acting contrary to national economic efficiency.
Perhaps the salient point of the contradiction relates to how personal costs influence government policy-makers. This in turn suggests that the path to reform of international economic policy must go beyond merely explaining the economics of trade, as desirable as this may be. That is, essential to international economic reform is the idea that peacetime protectionism must be personally more costly to government policy-makers. It is quite likely that reform along these lines encompasses changes that are of a quasi -constitutional or constitutional nature. At the time of the original publication, Professors Bohanon and Van Cott taught in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.