… is from page 320 of Richard Epstein’s magnificent 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World:
Ideas of unfairness are dangerous when not moored to any substantive theory.
DBx: Indeed they are. And such ideas of unfairness are even more dangerous when they are moored to substantively bad theories.
One such substantively bad theory is protectionism. Protectionists – operating, as they do, with unsound theories of both of trade and politics – believe that tariffs imposed abroad by other governments are unfair to people here at home. This belief makes no more sense than does the belief that confiscatory rates of taxation abroad, or crushing economic regulations abroad, are unfair to people here at home.
Such taxation and regulation abroad affect us here at home in precisely the same way as do protective tariffs imposed abroad. Yet in the case of taxation and regulation, most people understand that the unfairness is to the people in the countries whose governments inflict such taxation and regulation, while in the case of tariffs, protectionists have managed to connive the general public into believing that foreign tariffs are a benefit to people abroad and an unfairness – indeed, an injustice – visited by foreigners upon us here at home. It’s whackadoodle.
