As the domestic steelmakers went to Congress to sound off on the "Buy America" provision in the economic stimulus bill on Feb. 4, I went to the Web and counted responses. I found 3,000 Web sites or news story hits when I typed "Buy American" into Google.

At 11 p.m., I made a deal with myself that I'd go to bed when I found one that was supportive. At 2 a.m., I found an article on a pro-steel Web site and decided that was good enough and hustled off to sleep, feeling discouraged and defeated, not so much by anything about steel per se but by the stubborn intransigence of the economic community in the face of empirical contradiction of theory time and again.

Particularly discouraging was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Burton Malkiel, professor of economics at Princeton University, called "Congress Wants a Trade War." Malkiel, for those of you uninitiated in the ways of Wall Street, is famous for his "Random Walk" thesis, probably the single best analytical work to describe markets in the last 40 years of thought. He is a highly respected thought-leader and...