Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 469 of my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague’s – Veronique de Rugy’s – new paper “Export Subsidies,” which is a chapter in the collection Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century (edited by Max Rangeley and Daniel Hannan, 2025):

One of the biggest fallacies about trade is that the ultimate value of trade for a country is found in that country’s exports, with imports being valuable only insofar as they better enable the country to export. But in reality, the opposite is true: Imports are the end and exports are the means. If we could acquire imports without exporting anything, that would be the best of all worlds for us. Unfortunately, foreigners won’t work for us for free. They want things in return for what they produce for us, and so we must export.