Letter III: On Free Markets and Unfree Men
Trade divorced from virtue is but gilded bondage—prosperity bought at the soul’s expense.
“Trade divorced from virtue is but gilded bondage—prosperity bought at the soul’s expense.” —Letters to the Forgetful Republic
Dear Architect of Tomorrow’s Amnesia,
I write today not in defense of a man, a party, a movement, or a moment, but to wrestle with an idea. I am, by conviction and temperament, a classical liberal. I believe in liberty as the highest political good, in limited government, and in the free exchange of goods and ideas. I still believe in the immense virtue of free trade—not because it is convenient, but because, in its truest form, it is the economic expression of liberalism itself: voluntary exchange between consenting individuals.
And yet, I find myself troubled.
With the reemergence of tariff policy under President Donald Trump’s second term—particularly in his posture toward China—I am compelled to confront a tension between two values I have long held as sacred: the virtue of free trade and the inalienable right to human liberty. What happens when these values collide? When our economic openness enables the perpetuation of slavery abroad? When the marketplace becomes complicit in coercion?
This is no theoretical question. The Chinese Communist Party maintains an industrial-scale apparatus of repression, including the forced labor camps of Xinjiang, where Uyghur Muslims are detained, indoctrinated, and conscripted into servitude. The fruits of this suffering enter our ports and populate our shelves—competing against the honest labor of free citizens.
To pretend that such trade is “free” is to strip liberalism of its moral core. Commerce between free nations is a celebration of mutual liberty. But commerce that flows from chains and camps is not trade. It is tribute.
To transact with regimes that commodify human beings is not to extend liberty—it is to subsidize its annihilation. It is to lend our economic blessing to systems that would crush the very ideals we profess to cherish. A liberal democracy, if it wishes to remain so, has not only the right but the obligation to refuse that bargain.
To abstain from such entanglement is not protectionism. It is a refusal to become morally culpable.
President Lincoln grasped what too many of our contemporaries forget: that an economy erected on bondage is a gilded lie, and a union built on compromise with evil is a republic in name only. In 1858, he warned:
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it, “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty...
Later, in his Second Inaugural, Lincoln spoke with the solemnity of a prophet:
If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk... as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
He did not wage war for markets, nor preserve the Union by bargaining with moral rot. He understood that slavery was not merely a domestic policy—it was a test of the republic’s soul. And in standing firm, even at the price of war, he bequeathed to America the moral spine from which an entire century of prosperity would later grow.
It is no exaggeration to say that Lincoln’s stand against slavery midwifed the American century. The wealth that followed did not arise from neutrality, but from moral clarity.
Skeptics will protest that such clarity comes at a cost we cannot afford. But history teaches otherwise. In 1865, the United States abolished slavery—a system that, by the cold arithmetic of economics, gave the South a profound advantage: immense profits and low labor costs. Prices rose. The plantation class and the old order recoiled. Yet that act of conscience catalyzed an era of radical industrialization, shattered a stagnant economy, and forced the nation to innovate. Freed labor streamed into cities. Capital shifted from cotton fields to steel mills. The Gilded Age followed—not despite abolition, but because of it.
The end of slavery was not the end of prosperity. It was the beginning of an economic transformation that made America the most dynamic industrial power in the world.
I do not write this to praise all tariffs, nor to consecrate the creed of economic nationalism or those who wield it for power’s sake. I do not possess the protectionist impulse that would wall off American commerce in pursuit of electoral spoils, heedless of the stagnation it may invite. Nor do I impute moral substance to every duty proposed by Mr. Trump. Some are crude, others incoherent.
This is not about him. This is not about partisanship.
This is about whether liberty still binds our judgment.
Free trade is a noble principle—but like all noble things, it must be governed by conscience. We must not elevate the freedom of goods above the freedom of men. To trade with tyranny is to auction off our integrity. And a nation that forgets the difference between moral commerce and moral complicity may flourish for a season—but it forgets itself.
The republic is not upheld by profit margins, nor preserved by policy alone. It endures because a people remembers—remembers what it is, and more solemnly, what it must never become.
To reduce liberty to a ledger entry is to invite decay behind a façade of affluence. If we lose the capacity to distinguish between prosperity and principled prosperity, then prosperity, unmoored from virtue, shall devour its own foundations. And we shall awaken, rich and ruined, asking not only where the republic has gone, but whether we are still worthy of it.
Let us not sell what makes us free for what merely makes us comfortable. Let us not purchase ease at the price of honor, nor confuse silence with prudence.
The market must be the servant of man—not his master, and never the architect of his moral surrender.
Yours in Liberty,
—Thought Criminal
