Free Trade
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Are Free Traders Guilty of Naïve Globalism?
“Free trade does indeed enrich the world. But it also, and chiefly, enriches the people of each country that practices it, regardless of the policies pursued elsewhere.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Protectionism in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Harms Consumers and Domestic Industries
“The only jobs protected are those in the politically favored companies whose inefficiencies are protected from competition at the expense of other domestic jobs lost and higher prices on consumers.” ~ Brian Balfour
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The Libido for the Superficial
“Once the reality of a libido for the superficial is admitted, many phenomena are better understood. For example, it’s easy to understand, and excuse, intellectually unengaged people falling for protectionist fables.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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The Wages of Washington’s Economic War on China Are Not Cheap
“To make up lost revenue, the US industry may become more dependent on government largesse and ultimately less vibrant and dominating. Ultimately, making policy more like China risks turning US industry into something more like China’s.” ~ Doug Bandow
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Industrial Policy Returns, Prior Pratfalls Notwithstanding
“Letting politicians pick winners is the surest recipe for shafting consumers and every unsubsidized business. Unfortunately, there will always be enough pundits who failed Econ 101 to whoop up every boneheaded intervention.” ~ James Bovard
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On Some of the More Difficult Questions About Trade Policy, Continued.
“Reality is messy. It seldom presents to us ‘solutions.’ Much more often we are confronted only with trade-offs. Principled and informed defenders of a policy of free trade accept this fact. I wish that more defenders of protectionism did likewise.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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On Some of the More Difficult Questions About Trade Policy
“Empowering the home government today to use trade policy to protect against unfortunate commercial entanglements in the future raises the prospect of failure by the home government.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Mercantilist Follies, Then and Now
“Mercantilism encouraged governments to create and prop up inefficient domestic sectors, and incentivized merchants to curry favor with governments to extract privileges from them.” ~ Samuel Gregg
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Some Pictures Are Indeed Worth a Thousand Words
“No data or sets of graphs, regardless of how carefully constructed and intelligently interpreted, can convey a complete picture of an economy. Yet, such data can convey important information, which is often the opposite of popular narratives about the economy, generally, and about trade in particular.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Helping Y’all Understand Protectionism
“Given that protectionism violates the central purpose of any government, which is to benefit all its citizens, it replaces the justice of voluntary arrangements with the injustice imposed by involuntary arrangements.” ~ Gary M. Galles
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With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?
“Unfortunately, the patriotic protectionism story confuses American consumers’ friends and enemies. Our supposed enemies, foreign producers, are actually our friends, and our supposed friends, domestic producers and the US government, are actually our enemies.” ~ Gary M. Galles
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Trade, Debt, and Growth
“What are we getting for this unprecedented debt? Mostly, all it’s purchased for us is political leadership which can only charitably be characterized as mediocre.” ~ Robert F. Mulligan
