… is from a speech given in London on February 8, 1844, by Richard Cobden, as collected here through the painstaking work of David Hart:
Now, we are met by the monopolists with this objection: — If you have a free trade in corn, foreigners will send you their wheat here, but they will take nothing in return. The argument employed, in fact, amounts to this, if it amounts to anything — That they will give us their corn for nothing. I know not what can exceed the absurdity of these men, if they be honest, or their shallow and transparent knavery, if they be dishonest, in putting forward such an argument as that.
DBx: Protectionists are champions at offering ridiculous arguments. They were in Adam Smith’s day. They were in Richard Cobden’s day. They are in our day. To listen to people such as Donald Trump, Robert Lighthizer, Peter Navarro, and Sherrod Brown (to name only a handful of modern American protectionists), you’d swear that foreigners deviously give things away for free to Americans and, in doing so, enrich themselves and impoverish Americans.
Of course, protectionists don’t put matters in quite this way. They instead talk of “dumping,” “unfair trade,” “currency manipulation,” and “foreign subsidies,” and complain stupidly about trade deficits. But what these protectionists mean by most of these complaints is simply that foreigners allegedly are giving away too many valuable goods, services, and resources to Americans. Oh, and foreigners are also – so this ridiculous protectionist argument proceeds – further doing harm to us by (gasp!) investing on our shores!
The absurdity of this protectionist ‘argument’ (if it can be called such) is vast. Yet protectionism continues to be peddled by a coalition of the venal and the ignorant.
