Friday, February 23, 2018

THIS IS GOOD: A Protectionist is….

Tim Worstall writes:
A protectionist is someone who argues that you should be poorer so they can be richer.

6 comments:

  1. While I do appreciate pithiness, IMO this is a bit off the mark. Sure, there exist special business interests that lobby for tariffs in order to suppress their competition, but the primary reason that protectionism persists is because a many people mistakenly believe it to be generally beneficial.

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    1. It may be more nuanced than that. The question is, beneficial to whom? Producers? Capital providers? Workers? The state? Consumers?

      I think protectionism persists because people mistakenly believe that the purpose of economic activity is to create jobs (or sustain firms, by which they really mean jobs). That just reflects the intellectual impoverishment of Keynesian economic education. As readers of this site well know, the purpose of economic activity is to satisfy consumers' preferences. If people more readily understood that, they would see the flaws in protectionism.

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    2. @TheNAPster

      Protectionist policies shrink the size of the economic pie, so the beneficiaries are necessarily few. I would guess that the vast majority of those who advocate for them would be/are actually hurt by them.

      Exactly WHY people seem to be drawn to protectionism is another question, and I’m sure you could come up with plenty of compelling evolutionary and/or psychological explanations. I’m not sure that it makes sense to place the blame completely on Keynesianism, as protectionist/mercantilist policies have been popular since long before Adam Smith.

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    3. Yes, mercantilist policies have been around for many years, pre-dating Keynes, but I think that fact is only relevant as confirmation that producers have been lobbying for protectionism for hundreds of years. My question is why consumers put up with this. I could see why this would be so when consumers were mostly unschooled. The question is why, with so much schooling in economics in the modern society, consumers remain so silent.

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  2. Fair point Evan. But it describes that Florida family that drives US sugar import restrictions pretty well, no? Erm, Fanjul?

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    1. Tim,

      It does. And I didn’t mean to nitpick. I just view protectionism as one of many instances in the field of democratic policymaking where Hanlon’s Razor largely holds true.

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