… is from pages 242-243 of the 2003 Cato Institute edition of Johan Norberg’s indispensable 2001 volume, In Defense of Global Capitalism (original emphasis):
The defense of the mobility of capital is a question of freedom. This is not a matter of “the freedom of capital,” as the critics complain, because capital is not a person capable of being free or unfree. It is a matter of people’s freedom to decide what to do with their own resources – the freedom, for example, to invest their pension savings wherever they believe it is best to do so….
There is also a question of businesses being at liberty to seek financing from other countries. Factories and offices do not build themselves – it takes capital.
DBx: Americans who complain about the U.S. trade deficit in fact complain about not only global investors’ freedom to seek out and to take advantage of the best possible investment opportunities, but also that global investors find a disproportionately large number of promising investment opportunities here in the United States.
This complaint, to put it mildly, is bizarre.
