Mercantilismo, proteccionismo, patrioterismo berreta y otras imbecilidades recicladas

Si tienen un minuto, columna interesante en Reason.

Una pena que no esté en castilla para que la lea hasta el último pajarito hondeado que revolotea por ahí. Bah, como si se tratara de una cuestión racional:

In reality there are no imports and exports. From my point of view, there is only what I make and what everyone else makes. It’s the same for everyone else. Few people would want to live just on what they themselves could make. Frédéric Bastiat pointed out that each of us daily uses products we couldn’t make in isolation in a thousand years. Talk about poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short! What makes this phenomenon stranger still is that the same thing holds true for all men, Bastiat wrote. Every one of the members of society has consumed a million times more than he could have produced; yet no one has robbed anyone else.

This is just another way of saying that the case for free trade is conceded the moment someone eschews self-sufficiency. After that, we’re just haggling over the size of the trade area. But if free trade (read: division of labor) is good, then the bigger the free-trade area the better. Globalization should be the worldwide removal of all barriers to the exchange of goods and services—rather than trade managed through state capitalism and multinational bureaucracies. Unilateral, unconditional free trade is the smartest policy.