Jeffrey Tucker examines the awful idea of autarky. A slice:
The root here is Hegelian philosophy and its longing for a strong state to swamp individual decision-making. It is not so much economic as political and philosophical: history must drive toward centralized power under great men and their intellectual advisors. Economic forces must be restricted to the bounds of the nation-state, because those bounds are the limits of the jurisdiction of the powers that be. Trade outside the borders, in this case, represents a kind of treason against state power.
Speaking of nationalism, here’s Alberto Mingardi on Yoram Hazony’s new case for it. Here’s Alberto’s conclusion:
One thing the nation state typically despises is localism: which competes for people’s allegiance and their understanding of their own identity, but typically doesn’t have that monopolistic ambition over it which made nationalism so bloody and dreaded.
(And speaking of Hazony, here’s Russ Roberts’s recent podcast with him.)
Andy Puzder’s (and Trump’s) economic fallacies aside, Mark Perry asks how much an all-American-made iPhone would cost. A slice:
In addition to not understanding the basic economic principles of international trade, the Mercantilist-in-Chief also apparently doesn’t understand very well the business principles and dynamics of international production activities that are driven by complex, intricate, cross-border, global supply and value chains that have taken decades to develop. And it’s those global supply chains that are at work with the ultimate goal of producing products most efficiently to provide maximum value for global consumers.
I had no idea that my old professor Randy Holcombe is a “liberal” (as of the statist variety)!