Just about every time I visit Mark J. Perry's website I come away much more enlightened. It happened again with his article titled The ‘logic’ of protectionism leads to an absurd conclusion: complete self-sufficiency at the individual level where he updated a hypothetical situation written years ago by Walter Block.
Start with the wish for protection of American industrial workers. The jobs they had have gone to China, other Asian countries, or Mexico. If that's the whole story then protectionist tariffs might be justified. But the fallacy is exposed when the principle is shrunk to fit a smaller scale. For example, suppose one state applied tariffs to imports from other states for the same reason. Shrink it further, and one city does it to other cities. Keep shrinking to the neighborhood level, then to the individual level.
The fallacy is obvious. Each of us cannot manufacturer everything we need to survive much less what we want in order to enjoy life as we know it. Read the whole thing.
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