What is going on, we learn from TV and the Internet, is a war led every night by commentator Lou Dobbs of CNN against current, and pending, trade practices. On Monday night, Mr. Dobbs looked very grim and resolute as he accused American legislators of lying to the American people about the consequences of free trade.

Singled out for special obloquy is the pending treaty with five countries in Central America. Mr. Dobbs gave graphic descriptions of farm laborers in that part of the world who earn 90 cents per day. He spoke of the consequences for U.S. labor of outsourcing work, otherwise available to Americans earning 100 times as much.

The indignation of Mr. Dobbs caused some viewers to wonder whether there was, suddenly, a development in the economic picture that altered the common understanding of the case for free trade.

Roderick Boyd in the New York Sun reports: “One intellectual opponent of Mr. Dobbs’ said he focuses on the costs of America’s free-market policies without even trying to communicate the benefits. ‘His reports are often unbalanced,’ said an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Daniel Mitchell. ‘They resolutely do not measure the fact that our job growth is driven by the free movement of capital and workers in America.’ ” Mr. Mitchell added, “There has never been an example in global history where protectionism worked, period.”

That statement needs to be qualified. Protectionism can be made to “work” by the simple act of subsidy. Sugar imports into the United States are heavily restricted, with the result that harvesters in Louisiana are producing sugar at three to five times the cost of it in the Dominican Republic.

The protectionist argument was displayed on Mr. Dobbs’ show by means of charts. “If free trade means lower prices in the USA, do you approve these lower prices?” About 12% of respondents said yes, they liked lower prices. But the next chart asks, “If the lower prices mean unemployment in the United States, do you approve?” No, 72%.

If one looks diligently for what represents itself as a fresh point in current protectionist rhetoric, one focuses on the question of motivation. Lorrie Willey of the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times analyzes Dobbs’ argument, made in his book “Exporting America.” According to Mr. Dobbs, “offshoring,” as they’re now calling it, isn’t necessitated by any lack of skilled domestic workers, nor by the unproductivity of the American worker, nor even by any need for American companies to compete in global markets. “The simple reasoning behind this step is cost reduction, or, as Dobbs would put it, corporate greed.”

The screen takes us to India, and the commentator tells us that India has bought $5 billion of American-made goods last year, while the United States bought three times as much Indian-made goods. Indians have a facility for cyberwork, we learn, so that Indian technicians are widely employed by other nations.

It is true of the current economic scene that there is something on the order of fungibility in the use of certain skills. Years ago, American Express hired typists in the Third World to transcribe charge slips, hundreds of millions of them, to avoid paying American typists. The harvest of that outsourcing flows back to American Express offices through the ether. There is no pausing to be done at interdictionist blockades pressing for import fees.

What is new is the immaterialization of many economic products. There isn’t any way to send a banana through cyberspace, but that doesn’t really affect the basic reason for free trade, which is the doctrine of comparative advantage. Even though there is a universalization of skills, in an age when anybody can type on a keyboard, the acquisition of such skills by a Third World country does not diminish the value of goods being produced; rather it adds to it. The worker in Central America can hope to buy the radio made in Japan, or the computer made in California.

The proposition hasn’t changed, that the difference between greed and husbandry has to do with the perspective of the critic. When a century ago we were shown the horseless carriage, we didn’t think to focus on the greed of Henry Ford; we chose, rather, to applaud his ingenuity.

President Bush is standing by free trade policies (however imperfectly we abide by them). It requires acts of faith in economic laws to applaud free trade. But Adam Smith was resoundingly correct in laying down the law that both parties benefit, giving us the benefit of exposure to Mr. Dobbs, and the freedom to reject his counsel.