On China
---By Jason Brennan
On October 17, 2012 ·
Adam Smith devotes book IV of The Wealth of Nations to refuting an economic ideology he labels “mercantilism”. If you watched last night’s debates, you see that even today, mercantilism remains the commonsense economic worldview of the median American voter.
Both Obama and Romney spent time complaining about China. They probably both know better, but they also know Americans will punish them for telling the truth. After all, bad government is our fault, and honest candidates don’t stand a chance.
On the issue of China, here is more from Libertarianism What Everyone Needs to Know.
What would libertarians do about the rise of the Chinese economy?
- The main libertarian reaction to the rise of the Chinese economy is
to rejoice. Fifty years ago, Mao Zedong forced forty million or more
Chinese people to starve to death. Almost everyone in China was
desperately poor. Later, Deng Xiaoping, the de facto leader of China from
the late seventies until 1990, permitted a range of bottom-up reforms. He
let local municipalities decide how to invest, allowed foreign investment
and capitalist markets in special economic zones, and significantly
re-privatized farming. Agricultural and industrial output quickly
increased. Though China did not (and hasn’t yet) become rich, it went
from famines to food surpluses. From a humanitarian point of view, this
is wonderful. We should want everyone everywhere to be rich and
happy.
- Nations are not competing firms. Nations do not compete the way
Toyota and Honda compete. “We” are not competing with “them”.
- Economists have long said there is usually no stronger of an argument
to restrict trade between countries as there is to restrict trade between
individual cities or between individual people within the same country.
Trade is trade. It makes as much sense to protect America from China as
to protect New York City from Newark.
- Economists repeatedly stressand everyone repeatedly ignoresthat
international trade is nothing special. From an economic standpoint,
increased American trade with China is not much different from increased
Virginian trade with Maryland.
- Should the government use quotas or tariffs to make us buy domestic
goods? …one reliable, if imperfect, test that something is a positive-sum
game, or at least not a negative-sum game, is this: if given a choice, do
people want to play it? If we have to chain people to the
bargaining table to keep them from walking away, then we have to suspect
we’re not playing a game everyone can win.
- …do not be fooled by high [Chinese] growth rates. The US economy has
never grown as fast as the Chinese economy grows now. But the US and
Chinese economy are different. China experiences what economists call
“catch-up growth”. It had a poor, isolated, and dysfunctional economy.
Now, it can copy good business practices, institutions, and technological
innovations used in other countries. It thus grows very quickly. The US
is at the economic frontier. It cannot enjoy catch-up growth. It has no
one to catch up to. For it to grow, it cannot copy others. It has to
develop new ideas and technologies.
- To understand the difference between cutting-edge and catch-up growth, imagine what would happen to the US economy if Star Trek’s Vulcans traded us their warp drives and particle generators for our corn. The American economy would grow much faster than the Vulcan economy. The most economically illiterate Vulcans might then complain that the American economy would overtake the Vulcan economy.
- To understand the difference between cutting-edge and catch-up growth, imagine what would happen to the US economy if Star Trek’s Vulcans traded us their warp drives and particle generators for our corn. The American economy would grow much faster than the Vulcan economy. The most economically illiterate Vulcans might then complain that the American economy would overtake the Vulcan economy.
- … as the economist Frédéric Bastiat said, if goods do not cross
borders, troops will. China is prosperous because it sells stuff to
Americans. Economic interdependency reduces the probability two countries
will go to war, because it increases the amount they have to lose by
fighting.
- Athenians increasingly began to seek economic self-sufficiency
(autarkeia), which, for better or worse, they viewed as making them more
free (by minimizing their dependence on international trade). The drive
toward autarky led gradually to the formation of an ‘Athenian empire,’ as
Athens gained supremacy over its allies in the Delian League (formed in
478/7 bc against the Persians) and began to gather more resources so as
to be ‘self-sufficient.’
- What sort of foreign policy goes with mercantilism? A feverish one,
Plato might have said; and 2000 years later Adam Smith, moral philosopher
and Plato scholar would have agreed. If one believes that to buy foreign
products is to be a loser in a zero-sum game, then one will want to
acquire foreign products by some means other than paying for them. By the
same token, if one believes in self-sufficiency as an economic ideal,
then merely avoiding trade with neighboring countries will not be enough.
One will want to acquire their land and their working populations,
thereby moving closer to the ideal of national self-sufficiency. If one
is a mercantilist, one begins to think of military might as a first
resort, and of voluntary trade as a last resort. Mercantilists do not
treat either game as mutually advantageous. They see trade – paying to
import wanted goods – as a way of losing, and the military alternative as
a way of making the other side lose. So, partly in the name of protecting
domestic indus- try and promoting self-sufficiency as an alternative to
international trade, and partly out of a desire for glory, mercantilist
European states began building empires.
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