Protectionists are multiplying.  And they have names we recognize.  The virus is spreading to free traders who can't help themselves.  This Wall Street Journal article has these disturbing quotes from high profile victims, who have either fully succumbed to the virus, or are well into the first stages of fever.

Here is Alan Blinder, former Fed Reserve vice chairman, pre-infection:

"Like 99% of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free trader down to my toes," he wrote back in 2001.

Here is Alan Blinder, as the fever begins setting in:

But now he is saying loudly that a new industrial revolution -- communication technology that allows services to be delivered electronically from afar -- will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two. That's more than double the total of workers employed in manufacturing today. The job insecurity those workers face today is "only the tip of a very big iceberg," Mr. Blinder says.

Here is a brief symptom profile of others:

Paul Samuelson: 

Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, whose textbook taught generations, damns "economists' over-simple complacencies about globalization" and says rich-country workers aren't always winners from trade.

Lawrence Summers: 

Lawrence Summers, a cheerleader for trade expansion as Clinton Treasury secretary, says people who argue globalization is inevitable and retraining is enough to help displaced workers offer "pretty thin gruel" to the anxious global middle class.

Ralph Gomory: 

Ralph Gomory, International Business Machines Corp.'s former chief scientist who now heads the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says that changing technology and the rise of China and India could make the U.S. an also-ran if it loses many of its important industries.

Dani Rodrik: 

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik says global trade negotiations should focus on erecting new barriers against globalization, not lowering them, to help poor nations build domestic industries and give rich nations more time to retrain workers.

But Alan Blinder is still blind to remedies.  He likens protectionism to communism.  His views on what is right and wrong in trade are changing, but he has no idea how to achieve solutions.  Charlie Rangel's trade adjustment assistance to compensate workers from trade related job losses (aka Burial Insurance) are as far as the Old Dems have come - akin to moving from the stone age to the bronze age. 

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