'The fact that trade protection hurts the economy of the country that imposes it is one of the oldest but still most startling insights economics has to offer." So writes Columbia professor Jagdish Bhagwati in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Startling or not, that insight regarding the danger of trade protection is apparently not fully understood by Colorado's two new Democratic senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet. Given a chance Wednesday to strip the Senate stimulus package of a highly provocative "Buy America" provision, Udall and Bennet joined 63 of their colleagues in saying no.

Leave the incendiary mandate in, they said. And never mind the risk of retaliatory action from other nations that have expressed their concern. Never mind the possibility of a "trade war," to cite the words of a clearly worried President Barack Obama.

In part to placate Obama, the Senate did manage to pass an amendment that would prevent the Buy American measure, which applies to all stimulus-funded projects, from violating U.S. trade agreements. But just how meaningful that concession was remains to be seen.

In the meantime, we can only marvel that 65 of America's best and brightest either never learned or failed to absorb one of the most widely appreciated lessons of the Great Depression: that the Smoot-Hawley tariff was a blunder that helped deepen and prolong the downturn. Or maybe many senators do understand the danger of protectionism to a feeble economy but concluded that kowtowing to unions and to populist clamor was more important to them.

It's not a pretty portrait either way.

Wolves vs. sharpshooters

"It's a sad day for Rocky Mountain National Park when we're calling on snipers to shoot elk instead of restoring the park's natural heritage by putting wolves back on the landscape."

- John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians

Do elk really prefer having the life ripped out of them by ravenous wolves as opposed to dying from a clean shot by an expert marksman? If so, their loyalty to their oldtime nemesis, the four-legged predator with the distinctive snarl, is a marvel to behold.

Somehow I doubt that the elk being culled from Rocky Mountain National Park in order to save its groves of aspens and willows actually possess Horning's naturalistic bias. They'd rather not be killed by either bullet or beast, thank you very much. But the herd must be reduced or the park will suffer lasting damage. As one wildlife official explained, "the ecosystem in the park is being absolutely destroyed."

So it's decidedly not a sad day for the park. It's a bright day. And the question of whether it would be brighter still were wolves the ones doing the culling as opposed to marksmen is hardly a simple matter. The park's 415 square miles might seem vast, but some wolf packs range far wider. They'd soon enter other public lands as well as private property and populated areas.

And once they'd reduced the elk herd to a more reasonable number, the wolves would have even greater incentive to shift their sights.

None of this is to say we shouldn't reintroduce wolves into the park. But surely we shouldn't do so because the sight of sharpshooters performing a needed service seems to offend some folks.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.