He may come up short aligning foreign policy and national obligation when the present has departed from venerable past, but William F. Buckley can still cut a gem:
There isn't any way to send a banana through cyberspace, but that doesn't really affect the basic reason for free trade, which is the doctrine of comparative advantage. Even though there is a universalization of skills, in an age when anybody can type on a keyboard, the acquisition of such skills by a Third World country does not diminish the value of goods being produced, rather it adds to it. The worker in Central America can hope to buy the radio made in Japan, or the computer made in California.The proposition hasn't changed, that the difference between greed and husbandry has to do with the perspective of the critic. When a century ago we were shown the horseless carriage, we didn't think to focus on the greed of Henry Ford; we chose, rather, to applaud his ingenuity.
Buckley is speaking of free trade. But we see the keystone moral: Put the banana away. Close the disk drive.