First, Don Boudreaux quotes Mark Perry, translating the language of protectionism into English.
Second, here is an article. by a seemingly cogent defender of protectionism (Vox Day), arguing that because people have individual rights, they don't have individual rights. It's just that coherent.
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Questions for Aretae on free trade:
1) Is it valid to distinguish between the trade in undifferentiated commodities from the trade in consumer preference finished goods? 2) Between the trade in goods and the trade in people/human capital?
3) Is it a valid to protect young industries in their start up phase, then phase out the protections as they reach what should be their competitive peak?
4) An assumption underlying free trade is that displaced workers can move on to the next best productive opportunity, but if we are living in a welfare state, the next best opportunity might be living off the public purse. Your answer would be to get rid of the welfare state, but until I win that political battle, the calculation often seems to be spending a marginal dollar to keep a productive line of commerce open. IOW, in the presence of a welfare state, the free trade calculations change.
#1, #2, #4...I have to answer in a separate post.
#3. No. No. No. 100% of the time, this is a political favor-granting move equivalent to Obama granting favors to Solyndra. Including when Singapore does it. The political realities and the very real ignorance we have about what is important or will be important tomorrow make it completely impossible to do in the way that advocates imagine it should be done.
And even if it were somehow, magically possible to do effectively, it damages the competitiveness of the industries... allowing them to not make the hard(est) choices. Furthermore, as they get bigger, there is more political reason to support them not less. Which is why subsidies and tariffs effectively never die.
Fair enough, but we live in a world where governments, businesses, and individuals are picking winners and losers every day. We really can't shy away from such things, or we cease to exist. I want us to make better decisions, not abandon the decision making process in hopes of some free market provenance filling the void.
RSF,
My claim is that decisions made from the center are effectively guaranteed to be bad and stay bad. I am actively and specifically opposed to decisions made from the center, because those kinds of decisions have many characteristics which almost necessarily make them worse than free market choices.
While you say you want better decisions...I say that the feedback systems in place guarantee bad decisions (on average) if made from the center, and similarly guarantee better decisions made in a decentralized fashion.
Better centralized planning is NOT the solution. Centralized planning is THE problem. It's like methamphetemines.
Really. I'm not exaggerating. What we need to do is to stop that shit. We don't just need stronger stuff.
I think we have done an amazing experiment in Free Trade. We have in the United States genuine free trade between the 50 states. Given the economic power of those states, that is rather significant.
Can you honestly have free trade between States where the labor is not as free to move between those States as the goods? I don't think so. So, although I may agree with you (I think, but I am wrong a lot) I do believe we have to first agree on our definition of free trade.
HSA,
You also have to look seriously at the EU. While there is nominally freedom of labor, in reality, there are institutional constraints (speaking German fluently helps in the german trucking industry, even though nominally it's not part of the job description).
Now, I'm also a fan of labor mobility, but that's a separate discussion.
Next time you post on labor mobility, consider that when we buy a fan blade from Malaysia, we get just a fan blade. When we get mobile labor from Guatemala, we get a whole lot of future variables with which to contend, not all of them positive.
Labor mobility can also be code for gradual population replacement.
Mohammad Atta was mobile labor. We did not stop him, nor the lesser such items one gets with the current regime of "mobile labor". How can we trust the Libertarian authorities to protect us from such?
RSF,
My core position on immigration is, as it has been for a long time...
Immigration from poor to rich countries, on a per-person basis, is an enormous benefit for the person, a moderate economic benefit for the country, an unclear economic impact on the poorest folks in this country, and a poorly studied, potentially negative, certainly small other impact.
However...the benefit to the immigrant is so huge that the negatives have to be pretty large for anyone to be opposed to immigration, unless they value the impact on the immigrant at zero, or near zero.
More specifically...if we run a utilitarian calculus counting an immigrant's life/quality of life as having a slave's life worth of value (3/5), there's no contest...then NOT preventing immigration at much higher levels than we now allow wins hands down.
But that's not what this post is about.
Not the post, I realize, I'm just getting ready for when it next appears.
As was said before, it wins on a utilitarian calculation, but utilitarian calculations don't win at the end.
We had a bit of a discussion about the modern economy outpacing the productive capacity of those on the lower end of ability. Why advocate importing more of such folk? We end up debating how much of a welfare state we can support.
Every immigrant I know has made an essentially neutral shift in socio-economic status. I don't see any poor who have uplifted themselves. Do you know any?
More as I prepare for an upcoming discussion on "population shifts in service to conquering land area":
benefit to the immigrant is so huge ...I'm uncomfortable with this argument coming from you. It smacks of "to each according to their need". It also smacks of an economic mission with religious overtones: "Yeah, in the days of Aretae, poor immigrants did drink from the abundance of US capitalism, and they were made utilitarianismistic, and the native populace rejoiced, except for the apostates, who preached of limited economic resources, but they were shown to be sorely wrong by prophet Simon, who was always right, until the one day he was wrong..."
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