REPLY.

In this article, the author presents a reply to the criticism of his paper "An Economic Justification of Protectionism," published in the November 1958 issue of "Quarterly Journal of Economics." A number of comments on the paper which have reached the author orally or in writing seem to take as an article of faith that free trade is the optimum policy even where the conditions on which free trade is posited do not exist. They advance arguments which the writers would have recognized as invalid if their desire to support the sacred principle had not dulled their critical scrutiny. Researcher Anthony Y.C. Koo's comments, while the most serious of the lot, seem to the author not entirely free from this defect. One of the reasons for suggesting that Koo's data do not invalidate the original argument is that a comparison between the United States and other countries quite different from the one he made seems equally forceful. Even if used without the obviously necessary adjustments, in comparison with actual wage data they show that in the United States a very large farm-nonfarm differential in real wages exists.