Peace On Earth, Free Trade For Men

CATO ^ | 1998-12-31 | Daniel Griswold

[LifeComesFirst]

"So while it’s nice that you know about FDR and his oil embargo, maybe you should also consider that forcing Japan to open its markets didn’t turn out to be such a peaceful endeavor for the rest of the world. It was more like poking a nest of fire ants with a stick." So let me get this straight, you hope to disprove the notion that "if goods don't cross borders, soldiers will," by providing a historical instance where exactly that happened?

[LifeComesFirst]

"Yes, that’s all very nice. But what I wrote was WWI. That’s the Great War, which took place from 1914 to 1919. I realize that your understanding of history is a bit hazy at best, so you may not know that a major European war took place nearly two decades before the Depression and the Nazi Party’s rise to power. Nice try though. Keep cracking those books." Bismarck put protectionist policies into place too.

[LifeComesFirst]

“You are just the sort of person groups such as Cato need to evangelize their message. You take their theoretical talking points and go forth to spread the gospel, unhampered by any other education or real world experience.”

Do you have one iota of knowledge about what my real world experience is or isn’t?

“The reality is that purist economic theories exist in vacuums, totally divorced from all the sectors of the real world they supposedly “study”.”

Cite an example of such a theory.

“Economists are totally useless, usually worse than useless, when the realities of business, markets, domestic policies, international relations, etc., don’t match up with their theories.”

So you’re lumping all economists in the same boat, huh? Cite some examples.

“Real life is more complex than their laboratories and think tanks.”

Give an example of something economists say that reflects this statement.

“Most of us who have bothered to get real educations actually have studied economics, but as an addition to other fields of study, not as a total replacement of such, along with total rejection of common sense and observation.”

Cite an example of an economist who does not observe.

Of course, anybody who knows anything about science knows that the first thing that must be jettisoned is our common sense, because it is so often wrong. Only observation of empirical data and reason, with a little imagination, can help us. Relying on our intuitions, scientists didn’t discover and could not explain why a thrown object continues to move until let go. It took Newton, with his math and reason, rather than common sense, to discover that an object remains in a state of uniform motion unless acted upon by another force.

Common sense and observation would tell you the Earth is flat, and that the sun moves while the Earth remains motionless. But that’s not scientific, because it relies on one observer in one location assuming that his perspective is king.

Likewise, economists are in the business of seeing the economy as a whole, not from the perspective of one single person, or of a single span of time.

[meadsjn]

Since you're spamming your Cato/Ricardo garbage with multiple threads, I'm just going to cut&paste my response from the other one.

You have all your Cato/Ricardo talking points down pat, and all such have been debated and debunked here on FR over the past decade. I'm not going to repeat all of it now. You can do your own searches. Those who have been here all along have watched the actions and results of this manipulated global trade, and the verdict is overwhelmingly against Ricardo style global communism.

Suffice it to say global trade has been running along fairly unimpeded for the past two decades, and the economies of the various affected nations are either already collapsed or close to it.

I don't have to know what your background experience and education is to recognize the same Free Traitor talking points that show up every time some jackleg reads a few Cato web pages and a couple of essays on economics.

Welcome to Free Republic.

[Pining_4_TX]

Thank you! That is very pretty. Merry Christmas and blessings in tne New Year to you and your family.

[IM2MAD]

I’ve always wo ndered why FAIR TRADE is no longer considered an option.