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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.
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Free traders can only hope that future agreements will be improved and made universal.
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Opponents of free trade wish to prevent you and your fellow human beings from rendering to, and receiving from, each other the greatest possible amount of mutual assistance at improving your lives.
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With the new round of announced and threatened tariffs, we are approaching a policy that coupled with the corporate tax cut, can best be described as a revenue-neutral free trade tax.
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“It is not so much economic as political and philosophical: history must drive toward centralized power under great men and their intellectual advisors. Economic forces must be restricted to the bounds of the nation-state, because those bounds are the limits of the jurisdiction of the powers that be. Trade outside the borders, in this case,…
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This is perhaps the first lesson, and the most important, that students learn in economics.
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The following tale about trade, protectionism, and trade agreements is more realistic than it seems on the surface.
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Trump’s trade war is heating up. How can the Fed ensure it doesn’t cool down our economy too much?
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It is incredibly reckless to double taxes on imports from a particular country with the stroke of a pen. As robust and well-capitalized as the US is today, such actions foment more conflict, feed resentment, fuel nationalism, and take unnecessary risks with the economic well being of people the world over.
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Should the political order reflect a vision of society as a free association of individuals engaging in free exchange for mutual and general benefit and creating a complex society thereby? Or should it come from one that sees membership of a collective entity as primary and allows trade among insiders but puts barriers in the…