Here’s a letter to a long-time, critical reader of Café Hayek.
Mr. P__:
Thanks for your email
Sounding like Pres. Trump and a distressingly large number of politicians and pundits – left and right – you insist that “foreigners too long got away with abusing us on trade, which our president is finally stopping. That’s why Americans were wise to elect him.”
I could follow my usual course and share with you reams of evidence against the proposition that Americans have suffered economically as trade has expanded during the post-war decades. Your empirical premise is simply false.
But instead I’ll point out that each of the countless economic transactions that foreigners have had with Americans is a transaction that an American has engaged in voluntarily. Is your opinion of your fellow Americans really so low that you believe that we routinely get suckered when we engage commercially with non-Americans? Are you truly convinced that, when it comes to economic decision-making, foreigners are our superiors? Does your contempt for your fellow Americans run so deeply that you think that we can’t be trusted to spend and invest our own money prudently and productively – that we must, like children, have our economic decisions supervised and tightly controlled by a parent or guardian working from an oval office?
TThe implication of your argument is that your answer to each of these questions is “yes.” So now I ask a follow-up question: Because you hold your fellow Americans’ intelligence and competence in such low regard, why are you confident that the Americans who voted for Trump voted wisely? If most of us habitually make reckless economic choices, it’s likely that we also make reckless political choices.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
