First, very many (most?) free traders — including myself — support free trade ultimately because it’s consistent with individual liberty, while protectionism is an offense against individual liberty. Even if free trade somehow resulted in a reduced material standard of living, I and many other free traders would still champion it because of its non-economic virtue of being consistent with freedom. It’s fair for Mr. Chen and other protectionists not to esteem individual liberty as highly as do we free traders. It’s unfair, however, and mistaken for protectionists to accuse us free traders of valuing nothing higher than material enrichment.
Second, all motives for economic action ultimately are non-monetary (that is, they’re not about accumulating money for the sake of accumulating money). Some of these motives are material in a narrow sense and, hence, might be called “materialistic”: everyone must eat and be housed and clothed. And some of these materialistic motives are indeed crass and shallow and even contemptible: Joe uses some of his monetary earnings to get drunk on Friday nights while Janet regularly feeds some of her monetary earnings into slot machines. But other of these motives are not materialistic in any narrow sense: Jane spends much of her monetary earnings on piano lessons for her grandchildren while Jerry donates a portion of his monetary earnings to a community children’s theater and uses another portion to improve his and his wife’s learning by subscribing to The Rest Is History podcast. Because free trade increases the opportunities to do all of these things, it’s erroneous to suggest that the case for free trade is a case only for narrow material or sensual gratification.
Third, nearly all of the alleged non-materialistic benefits of protectionism are, in fact, materialistic benefits.
Consider, for example, job security. Job security is valued largely because a secure job is a secure stream of income. If job security really were a non-economic goal that trumps ‘mere’ material well-being, workers who have this goal could greatly increase the security of their jobs by offering to take a significant cut in their monetary wages. Yet, tellingly, such wage-cut offers seldom occur. The case for using protectionism to increase the job security of workers in protected industries is the case for having fellow citizens other than the protected workers pay the economic cost of making the protected jobs more secure.
It’s admirable to have non-economic goals. But it’s detestable to force other people to subsidize the achievement of these goals, and hypocritical to accuse those of us who object to such subsidization of being excessively materialistic. If any group in this situation is excessively materialistic, it’s the protected workers and the protectionists who apologize for them. These protectionists never pause to ponder what non-economic goals a policy of protectionism prevents the bulk of their fellow citizens from pursuing. As a result of having to pay prices driven higher by tariffs, how much leisure does a working mom lose? How much does a family’s education budget shrink? How much health care must another family forego? By how many years does dad postpone retirement?
If protectionists are in search of people who are mindlessly and narrowly materialistic – of people who are blind to the non-economic goals that most individuals have – protectionists should look in the mirror.
Previous post: Some Links
