It's fine to include meritocracy in #4, but why free trade? I know that free trade is often a fiscally conservative issue, but it simply helps all of us by rem

It's fine to include meritocracy in #4, but why free trade? I know that free trade is often a fiscally conservative issue, but it simply helps all of us by removing barriers to trade. The wealth of the world increases from it. ///edit: And actually, I want to continue and make a claim. Barriers to free trade _are_ an act of Kicking Out the Ladder. If we look at import taxes, they're just national protectionism. Which is possibly understandable if we're protecting a vital-to-war industry. But the U.S. has sugar import tariffs and makes our sugar ~40% more expensive than the rest of the world. http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/06/us-trade-policy-gouges-american-sugar-consumers http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/06/us-trade-po... (I know heritage is a conservative thinktank, just using it for the graph.) Our sugar tariffs just protects a small handful of cane sugar farmers/refiners in the US, at the cost to everyone, and with lost business to poor countries in the caribbean, who could probably use some more sugar sales. We're helping people with this tariff, but they're well-off americans we're helping. We could be help caribbean economies!! And if we actually did want to protect vital resources, then why don't we ban hard-drive imports? You saw how Thailand's flooding knocked over hard drive production. What if a hostile government took over Thailand's hard drive production? And furthermore, most of the government's foray's into regulating the economy are, or eventually become, acts of Kicking out the Ladder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture By even giving this kind of power to the government, you're asking for it to be abused.