{"id":8147,"date":"2011-03-07T09:56:21","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8147"},"modified":"2016-12-01T12:02:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T17:02:28","slug":"qotd-mercantilism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/03\/07\/qotd-mercantilism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Mercantilism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

You actually had a short, but interesting chapter in your book explaining why you think our trade balance with China is mostly irrelevant. Could you give people a short, but sweet synopsis of that argument?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adam Smith was the first to point this out in the Wealth of Nations<\/em>. The common wisdom at the time, mercantilism was the name it went by, was that the way a nation got rich was by exporting things. In return for the exports they\u2019d get gold. And Smith\u2019s going, I\u2019m paraphrasing broadly here, \u201cYou can\u2019t eat gold, you can\u2019t kiss gold, and gold won\u2019t keep you warm at night. Gold is just gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the exports, that\u2019s real stuff, and you\u2019re giving it away in favor of gold. He said imports are the good thing. Imports are when you\u2019re getting something you like. You\u2019re getting French wine. You\u2019re getting American tobacco. You\u2019re getting furs from Russia, getting whatever they were getting back in those days. He said exports are the way you pay for those imports. So imports are Christmas morning. Exports are January\u2019s Visa bill.<\/p>\n

People getting so upset because everything seems to be made in China — I understand it on the level of the jobs have moved overseas. I think it\u2019s probably an important thing to remember that if the jobs hadn\u2019t moved overseas, they probably would have just gone away. So, it\u2019s not like the Japanese have all of our car making jobs.<\/p>\n

John Hawkins, “The P.J. O\u2019Rourke Interview”, Grendel Report<\/em><\/a>, 2010-10-11<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You actually had a short, but interesting chapter in your book explaining why you think our trade balance with China is mostly irrelevant. Could you give people a short, but sweet synopsis of that argument? Adam Smith was the first to point this out in the Wealth of Nations. The common wisdom at the time, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,57,41],"tags":[1080,320,410],"class_list":["post-8147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-adamsmith","tag-freetrade","tag-mercantilism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-27p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36503,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8147\/revisions\/36503"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}