Our good friends over at Adam Smith Institute Blog were kind enough to publish a post of mine, on "Fair Trade."
For more on the effects of REAL commerce on "primitive" peoples, see Tyler Cowen's excellent book, "Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures." He really nailed it, with lots of interesting details.
My own conclusion:
"Fair trade" raises costs to consumers. Worse, it enslaves the people it claims to help, with the invisible chains of artificial subsidy, and arrested economic development. If it pleases you to think of happy natives, living primitive lives, just go rent a BBC documentary, and let the market work.
3 comments:
I love you, pumpkin. Can you please come over to England and knock some sense into my lefty colleagues (who actually deserve a biscuit and then a knock on the head). Fortunately, I was over my senior faculty mentor's house for his birthday and we proposed buying him unfair trade coffee...love the free market people in the dept.
Tommy the unfree and soon to be deported thanks to that fascist Jacqui Smith Englishman.
Just today, I found out I was turned down for a job for which I'm a "quite excellent candidate", because [essentially] Brits don't want dirty Americans' takin' thur jobs - even jobs at American companies. The UK IS NOT my top choice of places to live, but it was a great opportunity for which I'm uniquely qualified. And, I was hoping to smuggle a Land Rover Defender 90 SVX back into the US someday. Protectionism is great!
The Undercover Economist has a good chapter on free trade.
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