American Consequences - January 2019

TRADE MATH 101

binary quality: thrilling when in my element, humbling when not. It’s also a reminder of the genius of free trade. Free trade means, in essence, that we have the whole world competing to take our math classes for us! With free trade, the world is competing to serve our needs easier, cheaper, and faster. Meanwhile we get the “good grades.” As cash and effort costs are lowered, the value of our paychecks grows. Having the world’s most talented people fighting for our business is wonderful, but it’s not the greatest thing about the freedom to import (without politicians taking their cut). The greatest thing is that we’re freed from having to do what we royally suck at doing. We have fewer and fewer sleepless nights and nightmare-filled slumbers, thanks to our work being more and more a reflection of our individual talents. Free trade is capitalism’s way of giving us a career-long exemption from the math class equivalent so that we can focus all our energies on the equivalent of PE or lunch. For me, this means taking public-policy classes for life. Imagine what school would have been like if you had been encouraged – in fact, required – to avoid any instruction that made you look bad, hate school, dread Sunday evenings, or all three. And for a sense of what life is like when allegedly caring politicians shield their citizens from the world’s plenty, just imagine going to a school where the only class taught is calculus... Forever .

(Of course, if you happen to love math, you’ll have to reverse everything I just said. Strike out “calculus” and substitute “civics.”) But, speaking of calculus, it’s interesting that our ancestors – largely illiterate and innumerate though they were – had a good understanding of that subject. They could accurately predict what the curve of their life would be. Only 200 years ago our ancestors lived in a world without rapid exchange of goods and services across regional and national boundaries. And our lives were inexorably mapped out. This was true even in rich countries like the United States. Despite America’s seeming plenty, most people didn’t spend much time contemplating what they would do when they grew up. They knew that once able, they would likely work from dawn to dusk, six days a week, on a farm. Crude technologies and primitive transportation systems limited mass production and curtailed our ability to exchange the goods and services we produced for the goods and services produced by others. Very few of us could avoid being limited to doing only what we had to do, and most of what we had to do was back-breaking and un-remunerative. Inability to trade meant that human effort was directed toward the production of food. It didn’t matter whether or not we enjoyed farming, it was just what we did, regardless of our actual or potential skills. The world’s inhabitants worked the fields out of necessity. Then came mechanized farm machinery and chemical fertilizers. Yes, this destroyed

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January 2019

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