There’s nothing special about free trade across international borders. The principles are the same whether I in Pacific Grove am trading with someone in neighboring Monterey or someone in Mexico, Myanmar, or Morocco. Free trade both within a country and across international borders is what has led to our huge standard of living. If that doesn’t seem obvious, think about how you would live if you could never trade. You could never buy wood, food, clothing, pharmaceuticals, or computers and, moreover, could never buy the inputs that are used in making those things. In such a situation, many of us would starve.
We in the United States are lucky. Before the European Union was formed, we were the largest free trade zone in the world. With over 330 million people with a huge array of skills, with a lot of capital equipment, and with fairly decent mineral resources, we need to engage in less international trade than people in other countries. So if we couldn’t trade across borders, we would be worse off but not nearly as badly off as, say, Canadians if they couldn’t trade.
Still, international trade makes us substantially better off. We can get coffee from Colombia instead of buying the limited supplies that Hawaii has to offer and building expensive hothouses in the lower forty-eight. We can get bananas from Central America rather than building hothouses to grow them domestically. And how would we get rubber for our tires?
This is from David R. Henderson, “Globalization and Its Discontents,” Defining Ideas, March 2, 2023.
Read the whole thing.
