It’s been a while since I last offered an example of a modern, every day product that makes our lives cleaner and more sanitary.
I refer here not to the quotidian marvel that is an indoor flush urinal – with an automatic flush! (This one is in the Burlington, Vermont, airport.) Rather, I refer to the plastic liner with the brand name “Splash Hog.” This device reduces the splash – keeping men cleaner.
This addition to our capitalist cleanliness is small. But the many such small additions to our capitalist cleanliness add up to make our lives cleaner, more pleasant, and safer than at any time in history.
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The easiest way to appreciate the gains from trade is to imagine life without it. You would wake up early in a small, drafty house that you had built yourself. You would put on clothes that you wove yourself after shearing the two sheep that graze in your backyard. Then you would pluck a few coffee beans off the scraggly tree that does not grow particularly well in Minneapolis – all the while hoping that your chicken had laid an egg overnight so that you might have something to eat for breakfast. The bottom line is that our standard of living is high because we are able to focus on the tasks that we do best and trade for everything else.
[List’s] arguments, however, lacked the necessary analytical support. His assertion that free competition between two nations can be mutually beneficial only if both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development is completely unfounded. [What about several parts of a nation with different degrees of industrialisation?]
[T]he economist frequently finds himself in disagreement in regard to means with those whom he is in agreement with regard to ends; and in agreement in regard to means with those whose views regarding ends are entirely antipathetic to him….
Furthermore, one of the big problems with the domestic airline market is that foreign carriers, by law, are not allowed to serve domestic routes. Repealing that law would usher in much more competition and a new era of low-fare flights. So often when there is monopoly or partial monopoly, it is actually regulation that is at fault.
The book’s subtitle combines with the flyer that came along with the book to make me not want to read this volume.
A closer look at each free trade controversy reveals that there are significant shortcomings to each proposed argument against free trade. Perhaps the most glaring example is that of the infant industry argument, which economists, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bent over backward to accept in an effort to be fair-minded about the possibility of a positive government role. Yet a specific theoretical rationale for infant industry protection was never worked out and sound cost-benefit analyses of such protection was not undertaken until much later.
