A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Schwenkler vs. Larison on trade

There’s a spirited and high-quality debate about free trade between John Schwenkler and Daniel Larison at Larison’s site here.

I’ll admit that I’ve swung more into the protectionist camp in recent years, or at least I think the benefits of free trade have been greatly overblown. But old-time protectionism that benefits certain well-connected interests at the expense of everyone else isn’t the way to go. I do think some kind of shift toward greater local (and regional, national, etc.) self-sufficiency is necessary as well as real standards for labor and the environment. That doesn’t mean international trade will vanish or that we should strive for autarky, but for genuine democratic control over trade–as opposed to our current elite-enforced free trade consensus.

Related posts from the archives: A review of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful; “Schumacher on the poverty of economics”; “Localism and/vs. nationalism”; “Economics for community.”

, ,

One response to “Schwenkler vs. Larison on trade”

  1. John

    So I think that this is a really helpful point:

    … old-time protectionism that benefits certain well-connected interests at the expense of everyone else isn’t the way to go.

    One of my biggest barriers to accepting protectionist or restrictionist policies is that while I can, to some extent anyway, understand the underlying rationales, figuring out how to make them work in the way they’re supposed to is a real conundrum. Then again, I guess that many of our “free” trade agreements have effects similar to the sort you describe here.

    Also, re: environmental and labor standards. I suppose I’m pretty much not in agreement with you on the latter of these, since I think that much of this stuff is culturally relative and it’s pretty hard to swallow the ways that wage restrictions, etc. end up affecting the poorest of the poor – even a job that would be simply incomprehensible to us is better than much of the rest of what’s available to the average Malaysian. Environmental standards may be a different matter, though, but it seems important to recognize that at the end of the day it is supposed to be trade that we use to promote the relevant sorts of reforms; if we restrict trade for other reasons, it’s much less possible to use it as an incentive here. Right?

    Reply

Leave a comment