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… is from page 123 of Todd Buchholz’s 1995 volume, From Here to Economy [2]:
While domestic producers shout “Dumping!” almost every day, dumping typically takes place temporarily, during recessions, when an exporter has extra goods that it cannot sell at home. However, if an exporter permanently sells at a low price, it is not dumping but just a good deal.
DBx: For people in the home economy (say, the U.S.), the lower are the prices that exporters in foreign countries charge, the better. Getting more for your money is always better, despite the fact that bizarre hypotheticals can be spun in which the outcome in the future is grim. And recognize that “getting more for your money” really means getting more real goods and services in exchange for the real goods and services that you supply to others.
If non-Americans choose to give gifts to some of us Americans in the form of ‘free’ or subsidized goods and services, those of us who receive the gifts are made better off. And while some other Americans might thereby lose the ability to sell as much as they would otherwise sell, because these other Americans have no right – because these other Americans possess no entitlement, either legal or ethical – to sell some minimum amount of output, these other Americans lose nothing to which they are entitled. These other Americans are harmed no more and no differently than if some of their customers simply chose to increase their savings and thus to spend less on these other-Americans’ product offerings.
And yet these other Americans get all huffy and self-righteous. When they suspect (usually for the flimsiest of reasons) that foreigners are selling wares at prices that these other Americans somehow divine are ‘too’ low, they assert that they are victims, entitled to have the government restrict the freedoms and diminish the spending power of their fellow Americans. How arrogant. How cronyist. How truly greedy. How anti-social. How inexcusable.
Oh, these other Americans are expert at contriving all manner of excuses for government to predate on their fellow Americans. But none of these excuses withstand scrutiny. The bottom line is always that these other Americans wrongly and greedily believe themselves to be entitled to some minimum share of their fellow-citizens’ incomes.
How inexcusable.