<i>My objective in this essay is to try to explain why intellectuals who are interested in economic issues so consistently balk at the concept of comparative advantage.</i><p>This is ridiculous.  It was ridiculous then, and it&#x27;s even more ridiculous now.<p>If there is <i>anything</i> that economists (even Marx!) agreed on, it was the benefits of international free trade.  Hayek, Rothbard, Krugman, Mises, Keynes: all international free traders to a man.  I would be surprised if one in ten readers of HN thinks international free trade can hurt an economy: it&#x27;s a nearly universally assumed good amongst the intelligentsia.<p>It has always been the populists and, usually silently while publicly encouraging it for others, the mercantilists who have demurred.<p>I happen to think that the last twenty years have demonstrated that international free trade can be very detrimental to the majority of people in a particular economy, whatever theory might say, but the idea that this is a majority opinion amongst intelligent people (let us set aside the obvious response) is absurd.