It looks obvious

The coming election, and the populistic nature of political campaigns, focus some public interest about NAFTA and more recently about the trade agreement with Columbia. Voicing loud demand for protectionism, hoping to win the vote of specific interest groups, ignoring the simple reality that:

Producers exist to satisfy consumers; production is the means and consumption is the end. Protectionism is a policy built on the premise that consumers exist to satisfy producers.

As a side note - I’m not in favor of these trade agreements as well but not because I think that the government need to protect the “American Workers” or inefficient manufacturers but because I don’t think that the government should have role in free trade, beside of protecting it. Therefore the government role is to remove barriers, tariffs etc. as a general practice and not only when it granting political favors to satisfy other interests.

When the NY Times publish an an article like this it has to be a good day:

Bullying and protectionism have a lot in common. They both use force (either directly or through the power of the law) to enrich someone else at your involuntary expense. If you’re forced to pay $20 an hour to an American for goods you could have bought from a Mexican for $5 an hour, you’re being extorted. When a free trade agreement allows you to buy from the Mexican after all, rejoice in your liberation — even if Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and the rest of the presidential candidates don’t want you to.

One have to wonder why the civil-war as solution for freeing the slaves become so holly that questioning its efficiency - in light of the price in casualties, civil liberties and the political structures and balance between the states and the federal government. It seems that any criticism on the war, as the only way to free the slaves, and about its other motives is immediately rejected as racism. For someone like me, who is not emotionally invested in this discussion, it seems like an unreasonable approach. I don’t like the assuming of power by the federal government, nor by any level of government, and I can understand why some people have different view than the PC orthodoxy permits:

All of that states the matter very well. I remain convinced that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were fighting for constitutional liberty, including one of my own ancestors, and I think that was, is, something worth defending. If that repels the Jamie Kirchicks of the world, I have to conclude that I am on the right track.

The last link for today is a month old article in the economist that takes another look at the era of the hunter-gatherer:

Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture, the domestication of animals and plants, must be seen in the context of this progressive change. It was just another step: hunter-gatherers may have been using fire to encourage the growth of root plants in southern Africa 80,000 years ago. At 15,000 years ago people first domesticated another species—the wolf (though it was probably the wolves that took the initiative). After 12,000 years ago came crops. The internet and the mobile phone were in some vague sense almost predestined 50,000 years ago to appear eventually.

 

There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.