Protectionism sucks

Protectionism is making a comeback. Be it in Canada, where an adolescent believer in unicorn ponders the validity of the TPP (lord knows if he comprehends the acronym), the USA, where a socialist and a clown rage against big business screwing the working man, or the dark lord Merkel, desperate on blocking off Europe from the wider world. Economic history and reality demonstrate that the temptation of building walls and installing tariffs contradicts progress of any kind. Transnational interests. Open borders. Crony capitalism. The loaded words never seem to cease when flowing from the spewing mouths of university hipsters or San Francisco foragers. For anyone who enjoys sipping some Scotch on a cool urban evening, or popping a juicy Chilean grape under the beating sun, capitalism, raw and deliciously beautiful to the core, cannot be dismissed. For anyone who enjoys the finer things in life, the free movement of people, technology, goods and techniques must be encouraged. No person can be supreme at everything; the same humbling truth goes for countries as well. Whether a nation is resource-rich and poor, or highly educated and barren, the acceptance of specialization opens the door to broader consumption and greater happiness.

The latte-sipping left of North America claims that a unionized worker (whom they actually loathe) is punished by greedy industrialists when a factory shifts to Mexico. The bureaucrats of the European Union gleefully rub their palms together as they write every conceivable regulation into their trade apparatus, doing all that they can to protect the German and French farmers who wine and dine them. African despots smirk in the face of Western sanctions, for they know that their smugglers will fetch their caviar with ease while children’s bellies ache with hunger. The reality is that entrepreneurship cannot be quelled. Be they Soviets, Maoists, Nasserites or Fidelistas, the desires of man come knocking sooner or later – so why fight them? Why should a factory owner manufacture his wares when salaries are sky high? Why should a Canadian have to drown his breakfast in maple syrup to compensate for the absence of expensive orange juice? Free trade is the only way, and if the economically illiterate leaders and wannabe leaders of today don’t stop flirting with Bismarckian tariffs and bashing neoliberalism, there are always black markets that will undermine them, usurp them, and beat them. Creative destruction is a reality, but it is still hard to tell a coal miner’s son that his father is out of a job because, well, importing oil from abroad is simply cheaper. That may be a truthful answer, but it is not a fair answer. Instead of bashing the ingenuity of markets and falsely claiming brutishly that “we don’t need no foreigners,” we must strive, as societies, to improve the state of human capital. Charter schools, technical education, tax cuts for local hires, public-private training partnerships, expanded military service, curbed union power, and more accountable universities are just a few plausible solutions to improving the quality of a nation’s labor force, and hence, tending to the human resources necessary to jumpstart an economy and ignite new ideas and industries. We cannot hang on to the jobs of the past, and we cannot afford to shut out the incessant forces of the world. Should we try, the ghosts of markets past will surely haunt us.