… is from page 152 of Thomas Sowell’s Compassion Versus Guilt, a 1987 collection of some of his popular essays; specifically, it’s from Sowell’s June 14th, 1985, column titled “Chances versus Guarantees”:
People who bought homes in a quiet little town often become resentful when other people begin moving in, expanding and changing the community. They pass laws depriving other people of the right to buy and sell property freely. The excuse for depriving other people of their rights is that the people who were there first came to enjoy an atmosphere and lifestyle that will no longer be the same if they can’t keep others out.
What the original people paid for when they moved in was a chance for a particular way of life – not a guarantee. If they wanted a guarantee, they would have had to buy up the surrounding property as well. Instead, they go into court to get a guarantee free of charge.
American laws call for equal treatment and property rights. Yet people who happen to have been in town first are treated as more equal than others. Judges wave aside both the equal-treatment principle and property rights, in order to transform the chances that were originally bought into permanent guarantees. From an economic point of view, it’s the same as if judges declared that everyone who bought a raffle ticket [for a chance to win a car] is entitled to a car.
DBx: Profound and important.
Notice that the same principle applies to jobs. When protectionists plead for high tariffs to protect the existing jobs of particular workers, they plead for transforming workers’ ‘purchase’ of a chance not to lose those jobs into a guarantee – a guarantee paid for by fellow citizens in the form of higher prices for goods and services, as well as lost economic opportunities. The workers for whom protectionism is demanded could, after all, greatly increase their chances of keeping their current jobs by paying to do so – specifically, by taking wage cuts or by working harder with no corresponding increase in pay. But, obviously, these workers don’t themselves value the additional job security and non-wage benefits of their existing jobs highly enough to pay for these benefits themselves. These workers, however, are more than happy to have other people pay for these benefits. Protectionism is a means of compelling other people – mostly, fellow citizens – to pay for these benefits.
The core case for protectionism offered by Oren Cass, for example, is pretty much as described above. Ironically, Cass accuses free traders of being narrowly obsessed with money while, in contrast (he says) he and the workers whom he champions have higher, nobler, non-economic goals. But in fact the goals that he and the workers whom he champions have are neither non-economic nor ‘higher.’ The goals they have are not only very much economic (‘keep my job without having to take a pay cut’), they also are greedy in the accurate sense of this term (‘I want other people to pay for the benefits I enjoy but am unwilling myself to pay for; I want to force other people to subsidized my standard of living.’)
