It is just unimaginable that we could live anything resembling the lives we live without massive, massive amounts of trade. For example, you wake up and you pick up your toothbrush. It was made in Vietnam. You put some toothpaste on it. The ingredients came from Germany. You get a shirt. The cotton was grown in the United States, spun in Mexico, dyed in Indonesia and sewn in Bangladesh. You pick up your phone. It was designed in the United States. The chips came from Taiwan, the display from Korea, the gyroscope from Switzerland. You get your morning coffee that came from Ethiopia and eat it with a banana that came from Guatemala, and I’ll skip the rest of the day, just culminating when you go to sleep in your Ikea bed with a German memory-foam mattress and sheets made in Egypt.
DBx: Some people, reflecting on the reality that Furman describes, celebrate. I’m one of these people. Strangers from around the world cooperate peacefully to help each other to better achieve individual ends. And we’re also in awe of this cooperation, which is motivated and coordinated by prices and other market signals. No one designed this globe-spanning web of mutually advantageous cooperation. And no one could possibly design it. This web of cooperation is so intricate and complex – and so reliant upon billions of individuals each taking notice of, and reacting to, local knowledge – that attempts to improve it coercively through conscious intervention are doomed to fail.
Other people, in contrast, reflecting on the reality that Furman describes, are fearful and appalled. They’re fearful because their minds, to be frank, are insufficiently mature to understand that complex and productive orders can exist without being consciously designed and controlled. Remembering life as children when mommy and daddy were in charge, they worry that without the guiding hand of an authority figure society will spin out of control. They want mommy or daddy to control the economy.
They’re appalled because their immature minds ask what they take to be a rhetorical question, namely, “Wouldn’t it be better if we made all of those things ourselves, right here in our home country?” These immature minds never notice that if, say, Americans were to produce more toothbrushes (rather than import toothbrushes), Americans would produce fewer other things. Like the innocent child who is amazed by the game of peek-a-boo, they see only that which is immediately visible to their naked eyes.
