Free trade is always a hard sell. In all of social science, the idea that comes closest to being scientific, in terms of being theoretically provable and true in real life, is that a society benefits from allowing its citizens to buy what they wish—even from foreigners. The principle of free trade may be true, but it's not obviously true. Skeptics think that free trade is more like an article of religious faith than a sound policy recommendation. It's by considering all these things—the risk of losing your job one may minus the risk of losing it another, the extra money you make if your industry is protected from foreign competition minus the extra money you pay for goods and services that are protected— that you reach the conclusion that on average, free trade benefits us all. Still, a half-century of general prosperity in the US has created a climate of toleration, if not enthusiasm, for the free trade. Alarm about imports tends to ebb and flow with the economy—less in good times, more in bad. Part of the explanation is the special nature of the current prosperity, which is widening the income gap rather than narrowing it. Part is the growth of global economic forces that have an impact on national sovereignty. But the WTO isn't responsible for either of these trends, both of which are probably inevitable and neither of which undermines the basic case for free trade or for an organization empowered to promote trade through binding arbitration of trade disputes.