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The Spectacle Blog
Pundits and politicians love to talk about trade wars. But it’s a bad analogy. A successful military war at least results in victory for one side. A successful trade war hurts the aggressor at least as much as the aggressed.
Don Boudreaux uses a reductio ad absurdum to make that crystal clear:
Leader of Absurditoptia (A): I say, leader of Stupidia - we demand that you stop occupying that contested strip of land. If you refuse, we’ll have no choice but to shoot our own citizens.
Leader of Stupidia (S): You don’t scare us! That land is ours. And if you do kill some of your own people, make no mistake that we will immediately - and just as cruelly - commence to killing our own people. Courage is our national motto!
The whole exchange is worth a read.
To paraphrase Steven Landsburg, trade is what happens when someone has something you want, and you refuse to simply hit him over the head and take it. Instead, you give him something you don’t want that he values even more in exchange. Trade is the ultimate act of peace. It should be encouraged, not restricted.
View all comments (10) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Ryan Young
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/10/13/why-trade-and-war-are-differen
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Ken (Old Texican)| 10.13.10 @ 8:15PM
Ryan,
That was a good one. (Big grin)
.....Would you 'splain that to our present State Department?
MikeN| 10.13.10 @ 11:03PM
But are you really shooting your own citizens?
You now have more domestic employment in exchange for higher prices.
Chris| 10.14.10 @ 6:45AM
Agreed. Maximizing trade efficiency is not the end all and be all in national decision making. Free trade zealots never seem to understand that. Also their examples tend to be superficial so that when you scratch the surface don't apply to real life.
I would say China has been practicing trade warfare for 15-20 years against us and seems to be doing pretty well for their efforts.
Irish22| 10.14.10 @ 12:22PM
Good products at cheap prices, that will definitely kill us. Virtually all anti-trade policy forces many to pay higher prices to protect the jobs (and possibly the profits) of a few. Give me free(er) trade, and I will give you peace.
Mark in LA| 10.14.10 @ 4:37PM
At least until you try to take that freer trade away like the Chinese did to the British, which prompted the opium wars. There is just so much half-baked BS that passes as intelligent thought when it comes to the psuedo-science of economics.
James Grant just said today that the average cab driver knows as much as any economist what is going to happen next. Grant is one of the few people who has always known what he was talking about.
Ryan Young | 10.14.10 @ 12:56PM
Chris - China's currency manipulation makes its exports artificially cheap. That's bad for Chinese producers, who receive lower-than-market prices for their wares.
And that's good for U.S. consumers, who are essentially getting a free subsidy.
Chinese currency policy is to give to America with one hand while shooting itself with the other.
While I am grateful for their generosity, I'd consider a floating rate if I were them.
I leave it to you whether China is playing the part of Absurditopia or Stupidia.
jgo| 10.17.10 @ 2:14PM
Yes, open and honest trade is a win-win (positive sum for each participant). "Trade" involving subsidies, force and/or fraud, OTOH, is often negative sum (losses by one and or all).
Merely slapping the word "free" into an international trade agreement does not make it actuall free trade.
No country has honest money these days. India and Red China have insisted that the trading table be tilted steeply in their favor, even wailing and whining when we (USA and Europe) fail to give additional concesions to favor them as rapidly as they would prefer.
jgo| 10.17.10 @ 2:22PM
Irish22 hasn't caught on, but at least Immelt has done so partially.
When you move manufacturing over-seas, you also end up moving engineering, product design, software design, and the ability to stay on the leading ledge. You lose parts of your incubation and career development system for new US scientists, engineers, old experienced pros, and inventors. Instead of US HS and university students working their ways through and learning also on the job, we now have unemployed US students while their families subsidize the educations and living expenses of foreign grad students, and then we're told what a waste it would be to lose those foreign grad students by having them return home. You begin to lose your knowledge base.
It would be much better to open up those opportunities for under-grad and graduate research and apprenticeship for more US citizens (or Europeans as the case may be), and let the Indian citizens pay to educate Indian students, Chinese to educate Chinese students, with a reasonable amount (much much less than current levels) of manageable "cultural exchange".
weddingdresses | 6.23.11 @ 5:46AM
At least until you try to take that freer trade away like the Chinese did to the British, which prompted the opium wars. There is just so much half-baked BS that passes as intelligent thought when it comes to the psuedo-science of economics.
James Grant just said today that the average cab driver knows as much as any economist what is going to happen next. Grant is one of the few people who has always known what he was talking about.