Today in his weekly Wall Street Journal column, William Galston says that trade has not lived up to its promise because it has cost the U.S. too many jobs. (“Why Trade Critics Are Getting Traction, Mar. 30, 2016″)  Someone should give Mr. Galston a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as quickly as possible.  In equating U.S. jobs with the nation’s economic well-being, Mr. Galston ignores Smith’s key insight.  Smith taught that a nation’s wealth is measured not by its store of gold, its exports, or the number of jobs it has, but rather by the quantity of goods and services available for consumption by its populace.  Smith makes the point that the ultimate purpose of all economic activity is to satisfy human wants and needs.  Work and production are means to that end, but not ends in themselves.  In a world in which resources are scarce, employment of labor and other factors of production is the cost that a nation incurs in order to consume.  Hence, if a nation can reduce the employment of any resource, including labor, required to yield a given output, those freed up resources can then be used to produce even more goods, thus making the nation wealthier.  Simply put, a wealthy man is someone who can live well while working less; a nation is no different. Mr. Galston, like too many others in this political year, fails to grasp this basic economic point. (See also my earlier Posts on trade economics here and here.)