RALEIGH – Among the surprises the voters delivered in the July 20 party primaries was the rejection of the Republican candidates in two competitive U.S. House races – the 5th and 10th districts — who ran the hardest against free trade.

In the 5th District, which includes Winston-Salem and the state’s northwestern counties, conservative activist and city councilman Vernon Robinson and state Sen. Virginia Foxx were the top vote-getters and move on to an August 17 runoff. In the 10th District, which includes Hickory and the Catawba Valley, Sheriff David Huffman and state Rep. Patrick McHenry made the cut.

In both cases, there were other, well-financed Republican candidates, often leaders or former leaders of manufacturing companies, whose campaigns featured a great deal of trade-bashing. Their campaign ads and literature sought to elicit a powerful emotional response from nervous workers. One brochure had a pair of chopsticks and a reference to China “chopping our jobs.” Ed Broyhill, thought by some to be the frontrunner in the 5th, even oddly raised the possibility of blackmail. “This is not, to me, just an economic issue,” he told The Clemmons Courier. “What I see is a national security issue. Most of our manufacturing and textile products are now made in a communist nation that has not in years gone by been friendly to the United States. If a disagreement over Taiwan or South Korea came up, who’s to say they couldn’t hold us hostage as OPEC has done with oil.”

Hold our socks hostage? Our barstools? Huh?

Just as we saw in South Carolina, where free-trade advocate Jim DeMint easily won the GOP nomination to replace old-time protectionist Democrat Fritz Hollings, the idea that a large number of voters are primed and ready to leap backwards 80 years in economic policy is fallacious.

I’m not suggesting that Robinson, Foxx, Huffman, and McHenry have been paragons of free-market virtue. The fact is, they just haven’t been talking about the issue much. Robinson doesn’t list trade as a campaign issue on his website. McHenry, while questioning the fairness of some trade deals, has mostly focused his critical attention on North Carolina’s self-imposed economic woes such as tax increases, regulations, and poor highway performance. Frankly, I’d like to see them be more constructive here – perhaps embracing a new plan to eliminate agricultural subsidies and tariffs worldwide, which would result in dramatic gains for consumers, savings for taxpayers, and even benefits in the war on terror.

But I also understand why the political professionals have been offering different advice, and admit to being (pleasantly) surprised at how little the issue seems to have moved voters this year. There have always been protectionist tendencies in corners of North Carolina. I don’t just mean in the 20th century. Back in the mid-1800s, portions of central and western North Carolina became mainstays of the Whig Party as it sparred with the smaller-government, lower-tax, lower-tariff Democrats. More recently, manufacturers in such fields as apparel, textiles, and furniture have criticized free-trade deals for inviting a flood of cheap imports from Latin America and the Far East, costing tens of thousands of North Carolinians their jobs. While many of the executives of these businesses are Republicans, they’ve been vocal in the past couple of years about the possibility that their votes, their money, and their sway among peers and workers were up for grabs.

Quite apart from the politics, the economics of trade restrictions offer little legitimate ground for debate. Tariffs and quotas on foreign imports are simply tax increases on consumers, with all the usual deleterious consequences, while shielding firms from competition only postpones the inevitable rendezvous with reality. Some two centuries ago, Adam Smith pretty much answered all the relevant questions about whether nations grow wealthy from barricaded manufactures or open markets.

Here’s hoping his wisdom continues to stand the test of time.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.