Due to technical difficulties during the Senator’s opening statement, viewers may wish to read along as he speaks by downloading his remarks.

Free trade has long enjoyed public and bipartisan political support in the United States, but the political consensus has recently unraveled. Today, elected officials in both major U.S. political parties increasingly subordinate the United States’ longstanding commitment to free trade and the multilateral trading system to inward‐​looking ideological priorities, including concerns about national security and the people and communities left behind in our modern and globalized world.

This shift is misguided. International trade’s disruptions, while real, continue to be outweighed by its benefits for both the country and the world. Seismic shifts in industrial production, the rise of China, and a global pandemic surely require new and better U.S. policies, but abandoning free trade not only will fail to fix those problems, but also will leave us poorer and less secure in the process. A new Cato Institute project updates and reaffirms the economic, political, and moral cases for free trade, which are as strong today as they were when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations almost 250 years ago.

Please join us at 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, June 8, for a discussion featuring U.S. Senator Patrick Toomey (R‑PA), the National Retail Federation’s Jonathan Gold, and Cato’s Scott Lincicome.

(Lunch to follow)