Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 613 of Deirdre McCloskey’s new paper “Globalization, Long May It Reign,” which is a chapter in the collection Free Trade in the Twenty-First Century (edited by Max Rangeley and Daniel Hannan, 2025):

Yet left and right and middle cry, “Bring back manufacturing to the U.S., and establish self-sufficiency in the making of physical things.” The local version of the cry is “Keep money in the neighborhood.” “Buy American.” “Buy local.” But if these are such fine ideas, why not bring manufacturing back into your own house alone? Make everything yourself. It’s crazy. The crazy notion comes from the conviction that genuine output is a material good, and apple or an auto or an airplane, not “mere” services such as banking and insurance. It’s part of the prejudice against the middleman dating back to Aristotle and Confucius. It’s not sensible, as St. Thomas Aquinas among others noted.