THE LIMIT OF GOODNESS IN FREE TRADE. The question is rarely free trade but the l

THE LIMIT OF GOODNESS IN FREE TRADE.

The question is rarely free trade but the long term strategic and short term civic impact of loss of human capital.

And trade regulation is like violence and can be put to good or ill.

Bargaining with it is different from giving away rents. Making use of comparative advantage is different from losing strategic knowledge and capacity.

Weaponising comparative advantage in labor costs, credit, or technology is fairly easy and a common occurrence.

The most common example is selling mosquito nets in Africa and driving the local business out, then deciding it isn’t profitable enough of a market. The same is true for driving customer service and choice and quality from a market. Artificially constrained scarcity is frequently used to subsidise excellence in what would otherwise be a lowest common denominator market.

Shopping malls, tourist areas, City Centers, neighbourhood housing designs, regional building codes, inventory catalog assortments, national product distributions, advanced research and development industries and even elite universities and large industrial employers all practice the desire to maintain the quality and variety or consistency of their offerings. And it is precisely this technique which generates comparative advantage.

There are no limitless general rules in economics. The limit of the good of free trade is rent seeking but not does not include capital accumulation.

Lower short term prices at the expense of long term capital is one of the worst possible false efficiencies because it is not in fact productive.

Just as protection used to fund privatisation and political influence is one of the worst inefficiencies because it is neither productive nor increases capital nor produces discounts for consumers.

I distrust most current libertarian arguments because they all rely on limitless general rules which cannot exist in economics – a body of thought which describes equilibrial not linear processes.

So you should mistrust then just as much as any Keynesian restatement of Marxism.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute.

Kiev, Ukraine