The National Review reports that the American contest with China runs deeper than tariff schedules and diplomatic summits: beneath the surface, the United States is hard at work on building military capacity and industrial resilience. I take the observation seriously, because it is precisely the kind of claim I examined in my own time when the chartered monopolies — the East India Company foremost among them — dressed their private advantages in the language of national necessity.

Let me say plainly what I believe: a nation has a legitimate interest in its own defense, and that interest is one of the few I ever acknowledged as a proper ground for departing from free trade. When I discussed the Navigation Acts, I allowed that the defense of the realm might justify a preference for domestic shipping, however inefficient — because national security is not a commodity to be purchased at the cheapest foreign price. On that narrow ground, I concede the argument to those who speak of military capacity and industrial resilience.

But the argument has a boundary, and it is breached the moment 'national security' becomes a password that any producer may whisper to obtain protection from foreign competition. The steel producer, the semiconductor fabricator, the shipbuilder — each will discover, with remarkable facility, that his particular industry is indispensable to the survival of the republic. My own century was full of such merchants, and their petitions to Parliament were dressed in exactly this costume. The consumer, as ever, paid the bill in higher prices; the public good was invoked but not served.

What the National Review's framing leaves unexamined — and what I would press any policy-maker to examine — is the institutional question: who decides which industries are genuinely strategic, and by what transparent process? Without a disciplined framework for that judgment, 'industrial resilience' collapses into what I called the mercantile system: a conspiracy of producers against the consuming public, now wrapped in a flag. The invisible hand does not become more reliable because it wears a uniform.

I would also observe, as a matter of inference rather than recollection, that rivalry between great powers tends to produce a bidding war of subsidies and restrictions, each side citing the other's conduct as justification. This is the logic of the mercantilist — that wealth is a fixed stock and one nation's gain is another's loss. It was wrong in my century and it remains wrong in principle now. Trade is not a zero-sum contest; the gains from exchange are real, and they are destroyed, not merely redistributed, when exchange is suppressed.

The honest policy, as I understood it then and as I would urge now, is this: invest publicly in the genuine public goods — defense, justice, infrastructure, and the education that allows workers to move between industries as conditions change. Keep the list of protected 'strategic' sectors short, transparent, and subject to review. And resist, with great vigilance, the moment when the merchant's interest and the nation's interest are declared, by the merchant, to be identical. That is the oldest confidence trick in political economy, and it has not grown less dangerous with age.