Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on June 15, 2018
… is from Jim Powell’s November 20th, 1990, essay, “Why Trade Retaliation Closes Markets and Impoverishes People“:
Yet despite frequently repeated claims, it is hard to find a single significant case in which trade retaliation or retaliatory threats have forced open a foreign market. Examination of a large number of recent and historical cases of trade retaliation reveals that when retaliation-related market openings did occur, they were small. In many cases, countries responded to retaliation by further closing their markets—surely the opposite of what crowbar theorists intend. Consequently, the history of trade retaliation looks like a bad investment portfolio: small gains dwarfed by huge losses.
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