What I Feared My Son Would Ask Me When He Was Growing Up

From page 469 of Robert Higgs’s Winter 2001 Independent Review essay, “Unmitigated Mercantilism“:

When my son was growing up, I lived in constant fear that one day he would come to me and ask, “Dad, why do we have an Export-Import Bank?” Fortunately for me, that day never came. If it had, I would have been compelled to make a painful choice: either to lie to him, telling him that we need the bank to promote U.S. exports and create jobs, or to offer him the bitter truth, telling him that the bank is just another contrivance to shift wealth from the politically weak and alienated to the politically strong and connected, while sanctifying the transfer with incantations of economic humbug.

-RW

(ht Cafe Hayek)