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60 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 2 Apr \ on: 6 Myths About Globalization, Trade, Jobs, and "Buy American" econ
Whether free trade is good or not seems, as far as I can tell, to be a function of who is freely trading. If there's a small elite in your country that's strip-mining it, poisoning the land, making larger economic development impossible because they exert so much influence, then "free trade" is great for that elite, not so great for anyone else.
I have totally flipped on this issue over time. I think the circumstances in which free trade between nations is a universal good is fine in theory, but illusory in practice.
That's fine. In my mind it's actually not that important of an issue. Trade was one of my areas of focus and for a large country like the US completely abandoning trade would only cause something like a 2% hit to GDP, once the economy re-equilibrated. (It's extremely important to small countries, though.)
Your point gets at the implied (and generally false) assumption underlying these arguments, which is that property rights are reasonably enforced in all of the economies.
I'd be fine with someone taking the position "It's not good to trade with _______, because the way the government is subsidizing the export makes this basically a product of slavery."
Or, for the case you described, "It's not good to trade with _______, because the exports are derived from rampant property crimes."
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