The city block on which I live has always run an enormous trade deficit with the city block downtown where the Mall is located. We "import" for more goods into our houses than we "export" to the downtown Mall. As Rothbard says, so what? In reality, a national trade deficit is nothing more than an embarrassment to the government people as it could tend to reduce their power, but it is a nothing burger to the ordinary citizen who is not one of our rulers or their paid henchmen.
Stockman is so smart usually. But how can he deplore the "trade deficit" and a few sentences later mock the old-fashioned, backward, mercantilist way of thinking---? I find gripes about "unfair dumping" and "trade imbalances" analogous to the following: I shop at my local grocer for years, buying groceries, spending tens of thousands of dollars each year. He is the cheapest market in town, and provides the best service. For years I buy groceries from him with my dollars, and he buys my dollars with his groceries. But protectionists' way of thinking has it that "unfair trade" and an "imbalance of trade" has been going-on, because I've bought from my grocer for years, and he never buys from me; that my grocer has engaged in cheating, and in "unfair dumping of cheap product" upon me to my disadvantage and victimhood; Protectionists would have me and others to declare a trade war with my grocer, and refuse to import (buy) products from him until he bought product from me; that I should henceforth rely on domestic industry (my own labor and initiative) to produce my own vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, cheese, and the like (subsistence living, basically). So stupid that we're still arguing this crap, 240 years after Adam Smith. United States of Amnesia.
The city block on which I live has always run an enormous trade deficit with the city block downtown where the Mall is located. We "import" for more goods into our houses than we "export" to the downtown Mall. As Rothbard says, so what? In reality, a national trade deficit is nothing more than an embarrassment to the government people as it could tend to reduce their power, but it is a nothing burger to the ordinary citizen who is not one of our rulers or their paid henchmen.
ReplyDeleteAlso today, Stockman also had quite interesting things to say about Gary Cohn's departure.
ReplyDeleteStockman is so smart usually. But how can he deplore the "trade deficit" and a few sentences later mock the old-fashioned, backward, mercantilist way of thinking---?
ReplyDeleteI find gripes about "unfair dumping" and "trade imbalances" analogous to the following: I shop at my local grocer for years, buying groceries, spending tens of thousands of dollars each year. He is the cheapest market in town, and provides the best service. For years I buy groceries from him with my dollars, and he buys my dollars with his groceries. But protectionists' way of thinking has it that "unfair trade" and an "imbalance of trade" has been going-on, because I've bought from my grocer for years, and he never buys from me; that my grocer has engaged in cheating, and in "unfair dumping of cheap product" upon me to my disadvantage and victimhood; Protectionists would have me and others to declare a trade war with my grocer, and refuse to import (buy) products from him until he bought product from me; that I should henceforth rely on domestic industry (my own labor and initiative) to produce my own vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, cheese, and the like (subsistence living, basically).
So stupid that we're still arguing this crap, 240 years after Adam Smith. United States of Amnesia.