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But because no one in a market economy is entitled to his or her particular source of income, whenever competition obliges producers to adjust to the demands of consumers, producers — while paying the costs of participating in a market economy — suffer nothing that ought to be described as losses.
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It’s been a rough 2018 for those who support free trade across borders, but the Economic Policy Institute has unwittingly given us a lovely Christmas gift. While attempting to show how much the U.S. aluminum industry has benefited from the ten percent tariff imposed in March, it ends up demonstrating that even from an “American…
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Saying that trade has losers suggests that stopping trade would eliminate such losses. Wrong.
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For one thing, contrary to the administration’s promise, unilaterally raising tariffs hasn’t resulted in reduced foreign tariffs and better access to foreign markets for U.S. exporters. Instead, foreign tariffs have gone up, and threats of retaliation continue. That explains some of the drop in exports to China. But that’s not all that is at play…
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For China to crack down on its supposed violators of IP, import US law as its own, permit US courts to enforce it, and acquiesce to every other point demanded by the US, even if these impossibilities were possible, would end in making its economy less free, less productive, and more dangerous for free enterprise.
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Do you desire the well-being of all peoples in the world? Free trade is a wonderful way to see this realized. Tariffs only end in spreading misery, a classic case of man’s inhumanity to man. The sooner the U.S. administration realizes this, the better off everyone will be.
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The political and economic outlook undergirding the market order is often called individualism because of the central role of human volition in its unfolding. At the same time, this individualism creates a beautiful community of enterprise, one far more reliable, effective, and life-affirming that the false communities that politics assembles for us.
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Here’s the thing about international trade. When it is interrupted, even if only in a limited way, it affects everything — not immediately, but over time. Costs of production rise. Consumer prices rise. Trade routes are lost. Supply chains are disrupted. Retaliation is inevitable because governments are in control, and this causes more negative effects.
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One of the most common faulty premises that infects discussions of economic policy is the premise that a country is like a private for-profit company, only larger. Nearly everything that the United States President says about trade makes sense if you understand him to believe that the United States economy is a gargantuan for-profit firm.
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International trade is millions of mutually beneficial, voluntary transactions between firms and consumers that happen to lie across international borders. But that’s not how politicians or many in the general public conceptualize it.
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To “buy American,” as the nationalists and nativists demand, is to eschew today’s beneficial products while underrating the benefits of yesterday’s globalization of trade and fearing tomorrow’s.
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Governments should treat each others’ economic policies as given, if only because almost all government interventions artificially help some producers and hurt others. Because every government is forever grasping for excuses to protect politically powerful domestic producers from foreign competition, each government can find such excuses in even the most mundane actions of foreign governments.