I'd like to incorporate some techniques that I use in my own classes.
And one of them is that we start with a moment of silence to reflect on whatever we'd like to reflect on.
So could we just have a moment of silence?
I started doing that because in the last 15 years, I've taught at two Jesuit universities for 10 of those years.
And I'm not a Catholic, I'm not a Jesuit, I'm not even religious, but I feel I should sort of pay back my hosts in that way.
And that was one way I thought to do it. And it sort of stuck. So I'd like to use that as each session.
Also, I find that I lose students after about an hour. So I'm going to take a break at around 50, 55 minutes, just a two minute break,
get up stretch get a drink of water whatever and then we'll continue the
last half hour and also since economics and libertarianism are inherently boring
I try to I try to tell a joke at this time but I give you warning you know it's
sort of like when a bear plays the violin you don't ask how well he plays
you know just the fact that he can play is wonderful so when an economist tells
Well, it's a joke. You don't ask, is it a good joke? You shut up and laugh.
I'd like to thank Stephen Berger for providing money for support of this seminar.
I'd like to thank Lew Rockwell and his staff for providing a Mises Institute in which we can have this seminar.
I'd like to thank you people also. It's an honor to be here in this position to try to share with you some of my limited knowledge.
I think you people are amongst those who will be the future for freedom and prosperity if ever we attain that.
And it's an honor for me to have some small part in the development of you in that regard.
One of the problems I face is that it's a heterogeneous group.
There's a high school student, someone who just graduated high school, hasn't been to college yet.
There are undergraduates who are non-econ majors.
There are professors of economics.
So it's hard to, you know, I was asking myself, well, how should I pitch this?
And the way I figured I'd pitch it is I'd start slowly and sort of build up toward more radicalism,
and more challenging stuff.
And I can just say for the people who are graduate students,
you too will have to teach this stuff one day.
And even if I don't teach you anything new on free trade,
absolute advantage, comparative advantage,
I don't think I'll be able to.
Perhaps you can use this pedagogically.
And as I say, I'll be increasing the severity
or the complexity or something as the week goes on.
So, hopefully, I'll be able to cover all interests.
In preparing actually 15 lectures, because I'll be at the Mises Institute, the Mises University next week,
so I had to prepare 15 lectures, 10 for this week and five for the next.
I sort of had a chance to look over my stuff and, you know, think about what I've been doing and what I'm doing.
And I realized that calling it radical Austrianism, radical libertarianism is maybe only half correct.
In terms of libertarianism, I really am a weirdo, you know, it's amazing.
I've come up with some stuff that will shock you and all that,
and some of it which will be very challenging toward the end,
and a lot of that stuff I haven't published yet, so I might be wrong,
and heck, I can be wrong on stuff I've published too,
so always feel free to chip in because we want to do better and improve ourselves.
In terms of Austrianism, I don't think I'm quite that radical,
Although I've done one or two things
and I'm in the midst of doing something
which will be to attack the triangle,
which is the mainstay of Austrian business cycle theory.
So that might qualify and I'll get to that.
I'm gonna stick that in in the last day.
I'll have a lot to say this afternoon
on the distinction between Austrianism and libertarianism.
Let me just say that we can illustrate this perhaps
I'm going to use this with a Venn diagram and call this Austrianism and call this, no, I'm screwing it up, let me start again, I'm now into my Austrian stuff in economics and there is a distinction between Austrian economics and not libertarianism but rather mainstream or neoclassical economics
Neoclassical economics, call it mainstream economics, Chicago economics, whatever you want to call it.
The reason I pick out Chicago is because product differentiation, they're sort of the closest to us Austrians in some ways,
in the sense that there are really two free market schools of thought, Austrians and Chicagoans.
The rest of the profession isn't quite as free market.
and under Chicagoism I suppose I can include the public choices and a few other schools of thought that are pretty free enterprise but not as consistently so.
So what I want to say is that there are certain areas called area A where only Austrians reside, praxeology for example, and as I say I'll do a little bit more this afternoon on this.
There are some areas where Austrians don't tread and that's just the neoclassical types.
But there is an overlap and I shall be talking about some things on which there's an overlap.
For example, there's a great overlap on free trade. There's a great overlap on minimum wage.
There's a great overlap on 10 or 15 other subjects.
of the subjects.
But just because we agree
and the neoclassicals take those views
doesn't mean that Austrians too
can't contribute to these areas.
And indeed, usually when we do,
there are subtle differences which I will bring out
or attempt to bring out between us and them,
even on areas where we agree.
For example, on free trade,
it's the rare Austrian who does not favor
full and free and complete free trade
and unilateral declarations thereof.
Whereas the Chicagoites or the profession might say,
well, let's have a NAFTA or a CAFTA
and let's negotiate something like that.
So there will be some subtle differences in this regard.
Okay, let me, with these introductory remarks,
get into the subject of free trade.
I'll have some critical things to say about Milton Friedman but I wanted to share a little story with you that puts him in a very positive light and made me proud to be not just an Austrian economist but an economist in the general profession.
And what he said, and this is a paraphrase, I don't remember the exact words, but it was something along these lines that we economists, ever since Adam Smith, have all been pretty much 98% in favor of free trade.
And because of all of us, probably the tariff rate is one tenth of a percent lower than it would otherwise be.
And here's the punchline. And because of that, we've paid for our salaries a hundredfold.
Isn't that interesting? I mean, we're so few compared to the multitude of the population.
And we have had some small effect on reducing tariffs. And with it, we've paid our salaries a hundredfold.
so it shows that we're making some sort of contribution and here I include
certainly not just the Austrians but all economists who are pretty much the free
traders certainly the econ department at any university would be much more free
trade than the sociology department or the Marxist department well I repeat
myself okay I'm going to I said I wasn't too radical on economics but here I will
This presentation will have frontal nudity and sexual perversion.
So those of you who are a little squeamish, when I put those things up on the board, just sort of avert your eyes or something.
The way I'll be illustrating this is with a book.
The book came out in Canada. I was at the Fraser Institute for many years.
And the book was created by a bunch of anti-free traders.
They didn't want to get into NAFTA and the only reason we got into NAFTA,
and at the beginning was just the US and Canada,
the only reason we got into it is because the conservative party which wanted free trade got the yes vote
and the other two split the no vote for free trade.
So the yes for NAFTA got in even though a majority of Canadians were against it.
You don't hear anyone saying in Canada that we should get out of NAFTA.
So it's sort of lucky that we were in there.
And here is the rest of it.
The case against free trade, while you lose your job, the quality of your life will deteriorate,
you'll lose your cultural heritage, will disappear, if Brian Mulroney has his way.
Brian Mulroney was the Prime Minister of Canada at the time.
So I'm going to approach this through sort of Canadian eyeglasses, if I can put it in that way.
One, it's sometimes good to see things through the eyes of the other guy.
We always use American examples so it's good to see it from the eyes of Canada.
So I'm now appointing you all Canadians.
By the way, do you know how to tell a Canadian?
It's very difficult to tell them apart from an ordinary boring white person.
That's another joke on Canada and there are plenty of them.
How do you get 500 Canadians out of the swimming pool?
You just say, all Canadians out of the swimming pool.
They all get out because they're very, very obedient.
I was brought up in New York City and they have those walk and don't walk signs.
Don't Walk Signs, and I always thought, you know, everyone just ignores them, but in Canada they actually stand there when the light is green and it says don't walk. It's the most amazing thing.
I once got a jaywalking ticket for just walking. I mean, an RCMP guy grabbed me and said, didn't you see that? Don't Walk Signs? What Don't Walk Signs?
They're very different, but you're now honorary Canadians.
There's a horror scenario with free trade that a lot of people have, and that is that the Japanese or the Mexicans, for two different reasons, are going to take over the country, Canada.
The Japanese, because they're so bloody efficient and they'll do everything better than us and there'll be no jobs left for Canadians.
The Mexicans, not because they're so efficient, but because they are willing to work so cheaply.
So there's this horror story that if we have free trade with anyone, they'll get us Canadians.
We're afraid that we can't compete on TVs and VCRs and food and clothing
and now the Chinese are coming with textiles or something
and everyone can out-compete us.
Ross Perot ran for office and got a ton of votes
based on his giant swishing sound,
which was all American jobs disappearing down in Mexico
because they would out-compete us.
So you get lots of horror stories
And you get buy American crusades, where, you know, they'll have little signs, buy American.
In Florida, there was a lawmaker who suggested that if there were layoffs in the state university system,
that employees with non-American cars should be let go first.
The Howard tenure, if you buy a Toyota, you're out. It's just crazy.
One of the, another horror story is that the U.S. flag is made in Japan, you know, isn't that horrible?
And here's some more of your horror files.
100% of all baseballs used in the professional baseball league, American League and National League are made in Costa Rica.
90% of the batting gloves worn by major leaguers are made in the Far East.
90% of the shoes worn by baseball players, of the 23 giant video displays, screens in major league stadiums,
19 were made by Japanese companies, 3 by a Swiss and only one by an American firm, which is now out of business,
thanks to the evil imports of these screens, 17% of the players were not born in the U.S., you know, foreign players playing.
Isn't that horrible? I mean, it's the American game, you know.
We shouldn't be allowing these foreigners in because, you know, they take American jobs and all.
Even the NBA has now got a lot of foreign basketball players, Yao Ming from China.
Who the hell is he? Why should we let him come in here?
Just because he can play baseball, baseball, basketball, is the view that many people have.
It's, you know, various cities have tried to ban the import of tractors made out elsewhere,
but nowadays a tractor or a car have got components from, you know, 10 different countries.
And it's hard to, you know, be against foreign stuff when half of the car is foreign and half is domestic.
And, you know, it's hard to get the blood boiling.
but there are people that are good
at getting blood boiling at the idea of imports.
Okay, let's look again at the sign here,
which says Canada is not for sale.
The idea is that if we have free trade,
someone else will buy Canada.
Well, should we sell Canada?
The economist who has a cash register for a heart and dollar signs on his eyeballs is going to ask the question,
well, at what price?
There's this joke about a man asks a woman,
will you go to bed with me for a million dollars?
And she starts thinking, well, you know, not that kind of woman, but a million dollars.
And he says, well, will you go to bed with me for five dollars?
And she gets very indignant, how dare you, you know, and me go to bed with you?
Certainly not. And he says, well, we've already established the principle.
And we're just dickering over the price.
So what I'd like to do is establish the principle that Canada, or the US, or whatever country you're from,
is for sale and it only depends upon the price.
I mean, suppose I said, look, let's sell Canada, and you get the whole rest of the world, namely, everyone else in the rest of the world has to come to Canada, and we Canadians can now own everything, you know, the people in Africa, in Asia, in South America, they all have to come to Canada, there's plenty of room there, a lot of it's cold, but what the heck, we'll stick them in there, we can get the rest of the world, we can get Paris, London, how about if I throw in a cure for AIDS?
or a cure for cancer, or life forever, or the whole solar system.
I mean, the point is that there's nothing intrinsically pure and wonderful about the soil, the pure Canadian soil.
There's some price that most people would say, sure, let's sell it.
I mean, the whole question is a little silly because it's sort of a whole bunch of people and, you know, you can't all decide on whether to sell it.
But you get the principle, there's nothing wrong with selling the whole bloody country if need be, if it came to that.
But it's not coming to that, free trade doesn't mean you sell the country.
But that's the way these people put it to bring about the case against free trade.
Well, what is free trade?
Free trade is, I give you something, you give me something in return.
There was this wonderful Norman Rockwell Saturday evening post, front cover.
anyone see that I guess it's a little bit before the before your time Norman
Rockwell was a famous artist and he would illustrate them well he wasn't no
van Gogh but he was you know sort of an American kind of an artist and what he
had was a picture of a milkman and a pie man with the two of them sitting in
front of their trucks and each holding a bottle of milk and a pie and you know
what happened was that the milkman gave the the pie man a bottle of milk and the
The pie man gave the milk man a pie, and they each gained, because you know, this one had a ton of milk, he could swim in it, he was up to his armpits in milk, but he had no pie, and this one had all the pies in the world, but you can't just keep eating pies without having milk, and the two were a combination.
So this sort of illustrates what free trade is. I give you something, you give me something. Free trade is that government makes no law abridging freedom of trade.
Now, this usually applies for adults, not kids.
With kids, any parents know that kids are a special problem.
They're a special problem in life and in economics and in everything.
So, you know, if you have a contract with a three-year-old to give him,
you know, he gives you his lollipop or something, you know, this might or might not be considered...
In other words, if a law was passed saying that kids have to have special protection in contracts,
We wouldn't say that's a denial of free trade.
Similarly, we're not talking about selling military secrets or atom bombs or anything like that.
We're speaking usually when we speak about the case for free trade of ordinary commercial kinds of raw materials or finished processed goods or what have you.
And also, although I'll say when I get to drugs and porn and things like that and use body parts that
we don't usually think of free trade in those terms, but free trade would apply there.
Namely, if you had a law against trading in those things, that too would be a violation of free trade.
Well, there's a case for free trade on the moral and the economic grounds.
I'll spend most of the time on the economics of it,
but just let me spend a little time on the ethics of free trade and my claim is that there's a human right to engage in commerce
and that trade rights are just part and parcel of property rights. If you don't really own, if you really own something then you have a right to trade it.
If I own this pen I have a right to trade it. If I don't have a right to trade it then to that extent I don't really own it.
So a denial of free trade is a denial of property rights.
There's a famous statement from Norman Malcolm talking about his teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who I think was a cousin of Hayek.
And what Wittgenstein said is,
I'll give you this car or this tree or something,
provided that you do nothing with it and you don't prevent the previous owner from doing whatever he wants with it.
Well, in what sense can you be said to own it if you can't do anything with it or prevent other people from doing it?
In other words, the essence of owning is to be able to do with it what you want.
And one of the things that you could possibly want to do with it is to trade it.
So a denial of trade is a denial of private property rights.
And Nozick's very famous phrase, it's a capitalist act between consenting adults.
I love that phrase because, you know, the lefties are always talking about sexual acts between consenting adults and you pull this one on them, you know, how about a capitalist act between consenting adults and all of a sudden, you know, they're sort of...
Another line I like to use on my lefty friends is when they say they're socialists, I say, well, what kind of socialists are you, a coercive one or a voluntary one?
Voluntary one being in a commune or something and a coercive one being the one that they are.
But if you can sort of, you know, link coercion to socialism, you have a leg up on them, and they usually haven't heard that one,
so I offer this for your consideration when you next meet your next socialist buddy.
A second part of the moral case for trade is peace.
Historically, countries trade or fight, and if they trade, they don't fight.
I don't say there are no counter examples to this, but I think if you look over the broad sweep of history you'll see that the more integrated a country is with another country, trade relations, they get to know each other, they visit each other, they have dinner with each other, they don't see each other with horns or, you know, monsters or what have you, so it's harder to have a war, and wars are not really great things.
Okay, so much for the very limited case of ethics.
This is an economic section.
What I'll be doing is in the morning, the economics,
and in the afternoon, the ethics or law or libertarian theory.
So let me get to the economics of it.
And that is that trade benefits all parties to it
in the ex-ante sense.
If I trade you my tie for your pen,
it must mean that I value your pen more than my tie.
And I gain the difference to me subjectively between how I value the pen and how I value the time.
You on the other hand, if you're willing to make the trade, value this great Ludwig von Mises time more than the pen.
And you gain. We each profit. We each exploit the other.
Well, that's the way the Marxists would say it. We know that that's that's not true.
Later on, when I get into drugs, I'll say that I'm against taking drugs, but I'm going to toke up right now.
I keep going in this way.
Notice that this is only ex ante in the sense of anticipation.
Possibly later, you might regret your trade, and usually you don't.
So ex post, usually trades you make, you don't, unless you buy a lemon car or something.
You know, I bought this wristwatch for 10 bucks.
Even if it punks out after a year, oh, so I'll buy another one.
You know, usually you're not disappointed after the fact.
But we're not talking about after the fact, we're talking about in prospect
or in anticipation. Here we say necessarily
there's a benefit. Now right here there's a difference between Chicagoans or the
mainstream economists and the Austrians.
No one but an Austrian would say what I just said, that it's necessarily
apodictically, undeniably true, that whenever you have a trade, there's mutual benefit in the ex ante sense.
The neoclassicists are going to want to say, well, not so fast, tut-tut-tut, this is cultish, you know, this is unscientific, you have to test this.
If you don't test it empirically, you can't believe it.
Well, my view is, I mean, how are you going to test this?
If you know the English language, you know that what trade means is you want to improve your situation.
Another aspect of this is human action.
Human action is an attempt to trade a future which is less desirable for a future that is more desirable by acting now.
So we act now for future benefits and we think that if we trade the tie and the pen, we'll benefit.
Now, the motivations might be all screwed up.
It might be that the reason you're willing to make this trade is you think that if you make the trade, I'll give you an A.
But I'm not going to give you an A.
I'm not going to mark you, you know, so it would be foolish on your part.
So you'll be bitterly disappointed in retrospect if you make the trade, thinking that I'll give you an A when I'm not even marking you for this week.
So that, but that's only ex post. Ex ante, you're intending to buy this lousy type because you think it'll give you an A.
you don't really want it you don't wear ties you're a bunch of hippie t-shirt
when it wears whatever maybe you use it as a belt but you'd rather have leather
but you're only doing this to butter me up so you're wrong ex post but ex ante
you're anticipating incorrectly but still you're anticipating that you'll
benefit from having the tie giving up your pen another objection well what
What about a hostile takeover? I just said there's mutual benefit in all trade, but we've all heard about hostile takeovers, haven't we?
Well, the truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a hostile takeover.
What a hostile takeover really means is that some third party objects.
In other words, I'm Michael Milken and I buy a share of stock from you intending to take over the company.
Do you have to share stocks from you for a thousand bucks?
Were you willing to sell me the thousand dollar shares? Sure.
You benefited, otherwise you wouldn't have done it. I benefited. Who then
sees hostility? The person that sees hostility is other shareholders.
So there cannot be any
hostility between the trading partners. Third parties might object.
Look, you bought that t-shirt,
The blue with Levi's right on the front of it, you could have bought it at a different t-shirt store.
So we could say that Maximilian engaged in a hostile takeover of that t-shirt, if we're going to use this logic.
Because some other t-shirt person sensed hostility. You didn't buy it from him, so he doesn't like you.
Tough on him, but the point is that hostile takeover
does not, is not a successful objection
to the thesis that I'm offering.
Even the idea of takeover.
Takeover seems like, you know, I'm grabbing something,
but it's not, it's a mutual agreeable capitalist act
between consenting adults.
Okay, here is the first cartoon
to illustrate how these guys see trade. What you have is a big fat kid labeled
the United States and he said and there's a little kid labeled Canada he
has a maple leaf on his chest so you can tell he's a Canadian and the little
Canadian kid says I got two marbles what do you got obviously he's offering a
trade and the big fat kid hits him in the head and answers I got the two
And that's the way these people see free trade. It's preposterous, but we're in the minority.
I mean, if you had an election on free trade, we would lose it. So, invincibly ignorant are people.
So, when you people get your PhDs in econ and go out and teach, the freshmen students you get are all going to believe that this is what free trade is.
I once had this honors class at Loyola, and it wasn't on this subject, it was on the minimum wage, and finally after about six weeks I got through to them and they finally saw the point, and one girl, a very bright girl, she won all sorts of honors, she said, I see what you mean, but I don't like it.
I don't like it.
Well, if she was sitting here and she hadn't changed her mind, she would say,
well, I see what you mean, but I don't like it.
They have this sort of visceral thing that free trade is bonking someone and grabbing their stuff.
They don't distinguish between theft and free trade.
How can you reason with people like that?
It's tough.
You people who go on into academia will have a tough row ahead.
Later on I'll offer socio-biological theories why people are predisposed against the market.
But let me now just establish, if you need establishment of this, that there is a predisposition against the market.
Suppose I offer a penny for your car. Is this an insult? Well, maybe.
But did I do any hostile takeovers? No, you could just refuse.
So I haven't harmed you by offering a very low price, you're free to reject it.
Okay, let's move on.
Another fear is that there's this profound paternalistic fear that Canadian owners won't get a good price for their property.
There was a case in the US where, anyone know what Rockefeller Center is?
It's in New York City, it's a whole bunch of buildings, maybe 10, 12 buildings, some of them only 10 stories high, the bigger ones 40, 50, 60 stories high.
Japan bought Rockefeller Center, I think it was in the 90s, when real estate was sort of, well, let me not get into that, but they bought it.
And there was vicious and bitter wailing and gnashing of teeth.
You know, we fought, we beat them in World War II fair and square, didn't we?
And now they're coming and buying stuff?
You know, what do we have to do, nuke them again?
I mean, how much convincing do they need that they shouldn't mess with America?
That was the attitude.
You know, how dare these Japanese people take over Rockefeller Center?
Rockefeller Center, it's sort of like buying an American flag or something, there was just bitter tears at this, what happened is a few years later they sold it at a great loss, so they didn't make out ex post but ex ante they made out, as we've seen, but obviously the owners of Rockefeller Center must have figured that the several billions of dollars that they got for selling it were worth more than the Rockefeller Center itself, and they could buy half of Tokyo,
So that's what they wanted or whatever it is that they wanted eventually the money would get back to Japan, right?
So I'm not a real big fan of the fear that they're taking over or something like that.
There's another one from the Godfather, I think it was the first Godfather movie, but they all sort of run in, I couldn't say.
But I remember one, there was a guy wearing glasses on a massage table, remember this one?
It was in Las Vegas, yeah, it was in Las Vegas, and the mafioso, there were two mafiosos,
one was getting a massage and the other was trying to buy his hotel in Las Vegas,
and the guy who was offered to sell his hotel or the New Yorker who wanted to buy his hotel,
The Las Vegas guy felt insulted.
He said, you buy me out? No, I'll buy you out.
And they shot him right through the glasses.
I remember that scene.
But this is just economic ignorance.
You know, I buy you out, you buy me out.
It's a mutual thing.
You don't win if you buy someone out and he loses if he gets bought out.
That's just economic illiteracy.
Okay, here's another cartoon illustrating this.
You have Ronald Reagan, who's carving up the free-trade turkey.
Brian Mulroney has got a big chin, so whenever the artists, the cartoonists illustrate him,
they give him a much bigger chin than even he has.
And he's panting and offing because, you know, he's trying to get the table scraps.
It's just another way of saying that we'll be tenants in our own house
If we amalgamate with the Americans?
Well, let's consider that for a minute, tenants in our own house.
The idea would be that the Americans would buy up the Canadians houses and then rent it to them.
So I ask, which is it better, to be an owner of a house or a renter?
How many say owner? Raise your hand.
Two or three. How many say renter?
Two or three.
What's the right answer?
It depends. And what does it depend on?
Depends upon the prices.
I mean, suppose I have a choice of buying a middle class house of, oh,
2500 square feet in a front yard and a back yard for, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars.
Or renting it for a penny a month.
Which is better? Well, obviously, it's better to rent it, because you could take your quarter million, put it in a bank, get interest, even at a low rate of interest, it'd be more than a penny a month.
On the other hand, if they're willing to sell you the house for $10,000 and the rent is $5,000 a month, obviously, you buy it.
And in equilibrium, it shouldn't make any difference, because if it's much better to be a tenant than a landlord, the prices will change in such a way as to equilibrate these things.
There's a tendency. Here again, there's another difference between us and the mainstream.
We say a tendency. They say, you know, we'll always be at equilibrium or at least the unsophisticated of them say that.
So the right answer is there's nothing wrong with being a tenant in your own house if the rental price is low enough and the sale price was high enough.
And you sold it and you bought a whole bunch of stocks or you bought 10 other houses or whatever it is.
So there's no reason to fear being a tenant in your own house.
Here's another one to pull on your unwary students.
In order to see the benefits of trade more clearly, let's assume that there was no trade allowed.
But not only no trade between countries, no trade between states or provinces in the Canadian system,
no trade between cities, no trade between neighborhoods, no trade between families, no trade between individuals.
We each were self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is sort of a leftist ideal, you know. Canada must be self-sufficient.
We shouldn't import anything because, you know, it's impure or something like that.
Well, if we were all self-sufficient, we'd have to produce food and clothing and shelter and medicine and shoes and everything.
Life would be nasty, brutish and short. You couldn't live very long if you couldn't trade with people.
We owe our very lives to the fact that we can trade with people. If we couldn't trade, we'd be like Robinson Crusoe's, each on his own island.
And that would be a horrible situation. I mean, suppose you've got a toothache.
You don't know anything about the industry. What do you do? Punch yourself in the mouth or something?
You know, suppose you need penicillin. You don't know how to make penicillin.
You know, there was once this, I forget the name of the movie, but what the movie was, was they were in England and there was a banker and his wife and five kids and they had a butler.
And the first half hour was, you know, the banker was a great guy and he had a horse and a carriage and the butler had a scrub this and that and the other.
And then they went on a trip by boat and they capsized and they got lost on a desert island.
And now all of a sudden the roles changed and the banker couldn't do squat.
He didn't know how to make a fire, he couldn't collect wood, he couldn't shoot a rabbit or anything, whereas the butler was good at all this stuff.
So the balance of power between them started to shift and you know now the butler was giving the banker orders.
And then they got rescued and they went back to England and now all of a sudden you got back the old model.
model, and some people draw the conclusion that somehow to be a butler is better than
to be a banker because the butler can do more things. Well, on a desert island, okay. And
if you want to be on a desert island, fine, try to become a butler. But if you want to
live in civilization where we cooperate with each other, you have to specialize and engage
and Division of Labor, because we owe our lives to specialization and division of labor.
If we couldn't specialize and we couldn't divide labor, and we each had to specialize
in everything or, you know, be jacks of all trade and everything, most of us would die.
We would make Darf War or wherever it is, Ethiopia, where they're killing each other
I mean, if you want to become a good surgeon or a concert pianist, you have to play the piano or the violin 8-10 hours a day, and you have to practice surgery all the live long day, you can't be worried about making shoes and making sure you have food. That's why everyone has a role to play. That's why the guy who asks you, do you want fries with that? That's why everyone has a role to play. That's why the guy who asks you, do you want fries with that? That's why everyone has a role to play.
that is making a very important contribution to society because if he
weren't asking you if you want fries with that you couldn't be specializing
in what you're doing you'd have to get your own fries or your own burger you
couldn't be doing the scientific work that you'll be doing so we have to
appreciate everyone making a contribution to society from the
from the highest to the lowest.
Okay, let me show you another cartoon.
Here's the William Tell.
You know, the American is the eagle.
The Canadian is the beaver.
And the Canadian beaver puts the free trade apple over his head.
And you notice where the hole is? It's right in the middle of him.
So Ronald Reagan missed. He didn't hit the apple.
And what free trade means is you'll get shot holding the apple on your head.
Aren't these great cartoons? I mean, if ever you guys want to teach a course as a TA or something on this
and want to give a lecture on trade, I certainly will make all of these cartoons available.
you practically don't need notes just show these cartoons and just they're
just such wonderful cartoons illustrating a frame of mind of our
intellectual enemies on the free trade issue okay let's do some more serious
stuff let's do the absolute advantage what's going on with absolute advantage
I'm using this as an illustration.
I'm assuming that there are two goods, bananas and maple syrup, and there are two countries, Canada and Costa Rica,
and that there are two seasons or two days of production, and I'm assuming you can add these things up,
Namely, a unit of bananas equals a unit of maple syrup and you can add it up into some sort of GDP.
Notice I'm making all sorts of simplifying assumptions that are certainly a violation of all Austrian strictures but I want to illustrate this in a very simplified way
and I can't think of a better way to do it or that hasn't already been done so I'm offering this and sometimes students like numerical examples.
Okay, so Canada can't make a banana to save itself. How do they make bananas in Canada?
How could they make bananas in Canada?
Greenhouse.
In other words, all Canadians together, if they worked on bananas they could fetch out five bananas
because they're pitifully horrible at bananas because bananas need warm weather and you don't have that in Canada.
But when it comes to maple syrup, the Canadians are great, and the Canadian GDP is 10,005.
Whereas in Costa Rica, they're pretty good at bananas. They've got bananas growing out of their ears.
You know, you just sort of drop a banana peel, and then sort of like a jack-in-the-bean stalk, and you get bananas,
and you sort of have to run away lest the bananas attack you or something.
But when it comes to maple syrup, they're a little weak on maple syrup theory.
How do they make maple syrup in Costa Rica?
What's the southern equivalent of a hothouse?
A big refrigerator, a 200-foot tall refrigerator.
Very expensive to get a maple syrup unit out of that, but they can do it.
And the Costa Rican GDP is 15,020 because we add horizontally.
How many bananas are there given that there's no trade?
Well, there are 15,005 bananas.
How many maple syrup units are there?
Well, there are 10,020.
And what is world GDP?
25,025, everyone see the genesis of the numbers.
Now, if there's trade, each one will specialize in that which it has an absolute advantage.
Namely, each country will pour both days, not one day into each, but they'll specialize in one,
and they'll specialize in the one for which they have an absolute advantage.
Namely, the Costa Ricans will make bananas, and since they can make bananas at the rate of 15,000
and they have two seasons, they'll get 30,000 bananas and the Canadians who can make maple syrup at the rate of 10,000 units will put both seasons to that end and will get 20,000 and the world GDP will go from 25025 to 50,000.
And it's a nice numerical example. I wouldn't push it. It's not theoretically justified, but I think it's a good illustration of absolute advantage.
And sometimes, you know, with students, you have to say things in three different ways.
Because, you know, some students will be, they'll see the point from the ethical point of view.
Some will see it from the theoretical point of view. Some will see it from a numerical point of view.
so if you hit all three you might get some and a lot of times what I'll do and
I want to get back into pedagogy just a little bit is I'll ask students do you
get it and if they don't you know you know if I see students starting to nod
off I'll say you what do you think of this or whatever and if they don't get
it what I'll do is try to say it in a different way but there are only so many
Are there any ways that I can say it? Because I'm me, right?
Sometimes what I'll do is I'll get a student who really understands because he just got it from me
and I'll say you say it and that student can get it across to the student who doesn't get it better than I can
because he's saying it a different way with different body English or something.
So it's just another technique for getting ideas across to students.
You don't have to be the only one to say it. You can get them to say it to each other.
And sometimes by hearing it from them and then hearing it from you again, they get it in a better way.
Okay, that is absolute advantage. Here's another cartoon.
What free trade, notice that the US is a bigger guy than the Canadian again, big fat guy.
The game is five card free trade poker, everything is wild, six card draw.
It's my deal, my cards, my rules, my game and we play with your money. That's free trade.
Okay, now we do comparative advantage. And again we have two days or two seasons, two countries, two goods.
And this time it's wheat and cars and this time it's Canada and Japan. And Canada is pretty good at wheat,
Very good at wheat compared to cars. So you've got a Canadian GDP of 38, Japan's GDP is 180. How many wheats are there? 115. Now I'm adding vertically. How many cars? 103.
Okay, well now that's no trade and world GDP is 218 which you can add either vertically or horizontally. Everyone with me on this? Okay.
Well, now we have trade and each one specializes not in what it has an absolute advantage because Japan has an absolute advantage in both but in what they have a comparative advantage in and Japan is only twice as good as Canada, roughly twice as good as in wheat but Japan is 33 times better than Japan in cars or looking at it the other way Canada is fully one-third as efficient as Japan
Japan and wheat, but only 3% as good as in cars, so Japan will specialize in cars and produce 200, Canada will specialize in wheat and produce 2 times 35 or 70 and now world GDP goes up from 218 to 270, so it's just another numerical illustration
in a way of defending the point that free trade is a reasonable way to go about these things.
Now, I told you that there would be perversions, and those of you who are squeamish, avert your eyes.
Notice here is Brian Mulroney and notice that he's got his hands on his knees and notice that he's got his lips puckered
and Ronald Reagan is standing right in front of him. See, I'll leave the rest to your imagination.
Okay, now for those of you who are squeamish, you can open your eyes.
Here's another way to illustrate this absolute advantage. You get a lawyer and a typist, and the lawyer is a better lawyer than the typist, and the lawyer is a better typist than the typist, and the lawyer can earn $1000 a day, the typist can earn $150 a day.
When the lawyer trades, he gets two days as a lawyer, but he has to pay the typist two days.
I'm assuming that for every day of lawyering, there's a day of typing that has to be done.
So if the lawyer trades, he makes $2,000, but he has to pay $300 or he makes $1,700.
Whereas if he doesn't trade and he does everything himself, he makes $1,000 for one day,
and then he saves the typist's fee of $150 the other day,
and he makes a grand total of $1,150 in two days and since $1,700 is better than $1,150,
this shows that even if we are better than you, we can still trade with you.
See, most people, if you give them the absolute advantage business with bananas and maple syrup,
even the most die-hard people are going to say,
Okay, okay, we'll make an exception for tropical fruits, fine.
And their view is, okay, tropical fruits, fine.
But that's it, because otherwise you're taking away Canadian jobs.
So you can't just rely on the absolute advantage case.
You have to rely on comparative advantages as well,
and show that even if we are better than the others at both things,
Still, it pays to trade, and even if the Japanese are supermen, or even if the Mexicans are willing to work for a penny an hour, still it pays to economically integrate with other people.
The radical left position on this, I guess, would be no trade at all, maybe with the exception of tropical fruits if they're a little weak on theory, but maybe not.
The moderate view would be absolute advantage, fine, but not comparative advantage, that is the moderate left view, the view of, say, Ted Kennedy.
The moderate right view is to have NAFTA or Schnafta or CAFTA or all sorts of negotiations
and there's a public choice oriented reason, and by the way Mises anticipated the public choices in many important respects.
The idea here is that if you have a negotiation, where do you have the negotiation? In a Motel 6?
No. You have a negotiation in a five-star restaurant or a five-star hotel with a swimming pool and a golf course
and you have a meeting of maybe a half hour a day and the rest of the time you're on the golf course
or you're sucking up the whatever it is that you're sucking up and the thing goes on for a month
and you know they negotiate and they keep negotiating it's a lot of fun to negotiate
whereas you know some moron like Mises would say well you know let's just have a unilateral
declaration of free trade where's the negotiation you know what's in it for us so this is seen as
And yet, Hong Kong, before it became part of China, was a unilateral declaration of free trade.
Whereas, what NAFTA is, is really a customs union. They shouldn't use the word free trade.
I got into a lot of trouble when I worked at the Fraser Institute for saying things like this.
And things like this, they told me to shut up, because it was too radical, I was seen as a maniac, you know, to attack NAFTA, I mean, NAFTA was great, but it's just the customs union, what a customs union is, is free trade within the customs union, but you raise the tax to the rest of the world, that's not really free trade, then you have all sorts of exceptions in these negotiated things, you know, they have to now have minimum wages and unions,
and Labor Protections and Environmental This and That.
One of my sessions will be devoted to the environment.
And then, child labor in the sweatshop.
I got into a debate in Loyola. There's this priest there
who's about 6'10". He weighs about 400 pounds
and his fingers are about as big as a banana.
And he was shaking his finger at me.
My karate moves, it's been a while, because I thought he was going to come at me, but
happily he was peaceable, but he was getting red in the face and getting very angry and
he was saying, could Cathy Lee Gifford pay more for her sweatshops? I said, yeah, she
could pay more. If she was charitable, instead of paying twice or three times the prevailing
wage, she could pay ten times the prevailing wage. But now answer me a question. Is she
Is she a force for good or bad for the people in the third world countries?
Remember that she's paying only triple the prevailing wage.
She's a skinflint, you know, she's trying to exploit them by paying only triple.
I said to him, look, there are only three wages that she could be paying,
either higher, lower or the same as the prevailing wage.
If she paid lower, would anyone work for her?
I mean, if it was a dime a day and she paid a nickel a day, no one's going to come work for her.
If she paid the same amount, probably she wouldn't get much of her staff unless there was unemployment.
She's offering triple, well we don't know that it's triple, but she's offering a lot more as shown by the fact that everyone is lining up and dying to work for her.
But he wouldn't answer that question. He wouldn't say whether she was a force for good or bad. It's just, could she pay more?
I had to say, yeah, therefore she was evil because she wasn't paying more. It's hard to reason with them.
What I usually do in my classes at this time is I tell jokes because I find that it livens things up more and I'll share a few with you and one of the reasons I do this is because some students are late coming in and this way if I tell jokes they come back quicker and also they don't miss anything and I start joking around that these jokes will be on the exam and they won't be.
Okay, now you've heard a lot of blonde jokes. I'm going to reverse things and tell things that are payback for blonde jokes.
How many honest, intelligent, caring men in the world does it take to do the dishes?
Both of them.
Why did the man cross the road?
He heard the chicken was a slut.
Why does it take one million sperm to fertilize one egg? They won't stop and ask for directions.
On another pedagogical point, what I've done is I've given out handouts which are incompatible with each other.
On the one hand, I gave out handouts with the numbers that I put on the screen,
so that you wouldn't have to write down the numbers and you could focus on what I'm saying.
On the other hand, I gave out things to fill in, which is the opposite technique.
And I'm not sure which is best. And maybe we can have that as one of the discussion points.
Because I don't think that anything I've said is very controversial here in this group, but we'll see.
Okay, the next question I want to address is, but what about the poor workers who lose their jobs?
What about the poor Canadian banana workers?
See, he's a capitalist pig.
He has no feeling for the downtrodden.
I say, what about the Canadian banana workers or the Costa Rican maple syrup workers?
And he laughs.
The hell with them.
Typical capitalist pig.
Man after my own heart.
I paid him five bucks to do that.
Well, the answer I give to people who make this objection is based on expertise of tasks.
If you're sweeping out a banana industry, you can, without any loss in productivity,
The real people who lose out when the Canadian banana industry goes belly up are not the low-life people with no specialized training, but rather the banana biologist or the owner of the glass house or the guy that makes glass, namely people who have an investment either in human capital or in physical capital, namely the rich.
So, you can tell your students who are filled with the milk of human kindness and who worry about the underdog
that the people who lose when you have these switches are not the people at the bottom of the heap
but rather the people at the top of the heap.
And that tends to undermine their hatred for free trade because, you know, they're always in favor of the underdog
and, you know, we are in favor of the overdog supposedly, which isn't true, you know, we're just in favor of human rights.
But you know, at this point, I had a friend in high school whose father was an engineer and he was an engineer of something, I never caught on what it was, and this was in the late 50s, early 60s, and he was making a thousand a week, which, 50,000 a year, which was a very, very good salary for those days, and he had as many weeks as a consultant as he wanted, and then somebody invented something different.
I think that the import here is not from another country, but from our brains, but it's the same principle.
It could have been an import, but it was an import from our minds instead of from another country.
But the point is that as the years went on, instead of being able to get 50 weeks at 1,000,
it was 40, 30, and 20 weeks at 800, 600, 400, and then toward the end it was 2 or 3 weeks at 100 or 2.
Now this guy was a real macho type and he didn't want to retrain because he'd have to go learn stuff from people who he had looked down upon because he was at the top of the heap.
He could have been a TV repairman which was way beneath his dignity because he was mechanically inclined, as you can imagine, an engineer.
And what he did is he just sort of went unemployed and he made my friend and his family's life miserable, making sure that my friend never threw out a pair of socks or stuff like that.
So there is human tragedy involved in the Canadian banana industry going belly up and we shouldn't, when we're being serious, we shouldn't, you know, just ignore that.
But the point is that it's the people who are at the top of the heap that are going to suffer, but still there could be human tragedy in a personal psychological sense.
Because I mean this guy was a top engineer. He wasn't pushing a broom and yet there are tragedies.
Now, one of the points I want to make is that the market benefits all participants.
Well, haven't I just contradicted myself? Haven't I just said that the market benefits all participants?
But what about the Canadian banana industry and my friend's father?
Have I contradicted myself? On the one hand, there is human tragedy.
On the other hand, the market benefits all participants.
What's the reconciliation? How do I save myself from the contradiction charge?
The answer is that the Canadian banana industry and my friend's father, after the fact, are no longer part of the market.
Because to be part of the market isn't honorific. Not any jerk can be part of the market.
To be part of the market, you have to be able to make an offer.
Now remember that offer I made of a penny for your house?
Was I part of the market then?
No, because to be part of the market you have to make an offer that someone else is willing to accept.
And after free trade comes up or after this invention comes up,
the Canadian banana manufacturer and the Costa Rican maple syrup people
And the Canadian wheat people and the, no, rather the Canadian TV people and the Japanese wheat people are all out of the market.
They're no longer part of the market.
So that would be the reconciliation.
Okay, what else do we have here?
Yet another way to look at this.
And again, what I'm doing here is giving you numerous examples on the theory that if
something doesn't hit your students, something else will.
So, ask your students, suppose you pay $500 for a Japanese TV.
What are the Japanese going to do with the money?
They're going to have to send it back here because they don't use dollars over there.
If you're getting about the intermediation of the banks, just make it very simple.
They're going to have to send it back here and what are they going to buy?
Something, and the people that used to make US TVs or cars or whatever will now make these things that the Japanese want.
Maybe Rockefeller Center. They build a lot of Rockefeller Centers. Who knows?
But some bright kid will say, well, suppose the Japanese don't spend it back here.
Those sneaky, crafty Japanese, you know, they're trying to get us.
Well, what else can they do with the money?
Well, one thing they do with the money is go to India or China or Britain or Italy and spend it there.
But then, what do those guys do with the money? Well, they could spend it elsewhere.
And then you have the, what is it, Eurodollar, or the dollar is floating around there.
And what's happening is we're giving them, adding zeros to pieces of paper, and they're giving us TVs and stuff.
Another thing those lousy, rotten, nasty Japanese can do is put the money in their mattress or burn it.
I mean, they're shifty. They're likely to do this. They're so disgusting.
But if they did that again, it would be the same old thing. We're giving them a piece of paper. They're giving us stuff.
Then there's this thing about dumping. When I first heard dumping, what I figured it was was some big airplane filled with Volkswagens or Toyotas.
And what they do is they drop them out at around 30,000 feet and, you know, they hit us.
That's where I thought dumping was. Because, you know, dumping is bad and, you know, what could be dumping?
If we could be dumping, they'd drop cars on us or drop TV sets like little missiles.
But that's not at all what dumping means.
What dumping means, of course, is selling a product at a price below which the competitors think is a fair price.
Okay.
Now, I told you there'd be frontal nudity.
Well, there's Simon Reisman, who was the Canadian negotiator of NAFTA, and Peter Murphy.
Now, you can see that Simon Reisman, except for a strategically placed maple leaf, is totally frontally nude.
So keep your eyes closed. Whereas notice that Peter Murphy has got two suits.
see he's got a striped suit and a gray suit and he's got two ties and and you
can see his fly is open so there's a gray suit gray pants under there that
marvelous that was the free trade negotiation between Canada and the US so
I've acquitted my promise of frontal nudity and perversion and now I'm going
to consider a whole bunch of objections to the thesis the first one is that we
We should have fair trade, not free trade, and this resonates because we do have an idea of fairness in sports.
For example, at halftime, the football teams switch sides,
lest there be a slight uphill or downhill, or maybe the sun's in these guys' eyes or that guy's eyes, right?
And in basketball, they switch sides, and in volleyball, they switch sides, and in tennis, they're forever switching sides.
And again, they want to have fairness, because at the end of the day, they want to say that a better team won.
But trade is not a game. Game theoreticians to the contrary notwithstanding, trade is a mutual benefit.
You don't want fairness in that sense, of the sports sense, because if you had fairness, there'd be no trade.
In other words, if what fairness means is getting rid of absolute and comparative advantage, which seems to be what they mean, then we'd have no trade.
See, there's all the world of difference between games and the economy. Take the game of monopoly.
When I land on boardwalk that you own and you've got a hotel there and I have to pay $2,000, is there a mutual gain?
Mutual gain? No, I'm losing. I stayed at this Auburn Hotel the other night, I forget what I paid, Lew's going to pay for it, hopefully, so I didn't even look, but it was a mutual beneficial thing.
If I didn't get in there, I'd have slept on the sidewalk or somewhere, so I gained, you know, I paid 80 bucks and I valued it more than 80 and they valued me there because the room would have been empty.
So it was mutual gain. Whereas in monopoly, it's not mutual gain. I'm losing when I buy.
So the analogy between sports and economics is something that you have to take with a grain of salt, with a big grain of salt, because there's a disanalogy.
A thing that resonated with Canadians, Canadians are always afraid of being ewers of wood and drawers of water.
Ewers of wood and drawers of water.
Namely, Canada, for all intents and purposes, is a suburb of the US.
You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's a big country geographically,
but in terms of the people, it's only 30 million people, about as big as California,
and they're all huddled within about a hundred miles of the U.S. because it's cool up there.
They have this city called Winnipeg, I call it Winterpeg.
I once gave a lecture there in November or December, it was like 50 below.
It was amazing, you know, all I had to do was go from the airport to a car about 30 feet
and it hurt to breathe, it was so cold, it was really cold there.
So most of it is just sort of useless. Land, the land.
Well, why shouldn't they be ewers of wood and drawers of water?
I mean, the people in Iowa are farmers. What's wrong with that?
I mean, do you have to really be rich? Let me put it this way.
Do you have to really be into manufacturing in order to be rich?
No. There are areas in the United States like Iowa where it's pretty rich
And if it were ever such that you had to have manufacturing and you made a lot of profit in manufacturing and in drawing wood and being resource-based, being on the periphery was very low profit, well people would leave this and go there until things started equalizing.
So there's nothing intrinsically bad about resources.
I mean these Christian types who are always writing bishop statements and papal encyclicals on the economy, somehow they have the idea that if you're in the center you're good and if you're in the periphery you're bad.
But that's just economic illiteracy. Profits tend to equalize all over the place, geographically, across industries, across everything.
Now, when the government stops the flow of goods and capital, then yes, but in a free enterprise society, just like before we said, which is better to be a renter or an owner?
And the answer is, it depends on what you're getting. Well, so does it, you know, which is it better to be a manufacturer of a car or a farmer of corn?
it depends on the price and and if the prices get out of line there'll be some
sort of equilibration process okay here's another cartoon Trojan Horse this
is free trade notice that chin there and that's his advisor it looks okay to me
very as I say these cartoons alone when I saw that book I said oh that book is
Another objection that the Canadians had who didn't want NAFTA is they feared political integration.
They feared being taken over by the U.S. and being made the 51st state.
I mean, most Americans don't even know that Canada exists.
We have no ambitions to take over, but they're paranoid.
I remember when I first moved to Vancouver, I asked some of my friends, are there any libertarian Austrians in Vancouver, and they gave me addresses in Toronto.
Vancouver is near Seattle, Toronto is near Buffalo, you know, like they didn't know, and these are intelligent buddies of mine.
I didn't know before I got there, you know, it's just a vast wilderness, whereas they know everything that goes on here.
Because all their TV stations are American, except for the CBC, which is...
Don't get me started on the CBC. It's sort of like the PBS on steroids. It's just horrible.
So even George Bush has no ambitions to take over Canada. What more can I say?
Hey! I mean, he's taking over everywhere else. Well, they'll probably be insulted.
Why? He doesn't want to take us over? Aren't we as good as Iraq?
The point is that the U.S. could take over militarily anytime they wanted to.
I mean, the Canadian Army consists of, I don't know, a police car.
The Canadian Navy consists of three rowboats.
Political integration, at the time I wrote it, didn't occur in the EEC, although now it seems to be becoming more politically integrated, but it need not be.
The European Economic Community could have gone on forever without any political integration, and even though the US is bigger than Canada,
Britain, France and Germany are way bigger than Liechtenstein, Portugal and Netherlands, Belgium.
The Scandinavian free trade, Sweden is much bigger than Norway and Finland, which together are much bigger than Iceland and they never got politically integrated.
So the two are very separate. You don't have to be politically integrated just because you're economically integrated.
Notice that the Canadian has reindeer antlers on his head? Agreed. Canada will corner the North American market on hand-carved Haida chess pieces, Haida is an Indian tribe, and boards while the U.S. controls oil. Another indication.
Tariff protection can be justified on monopoly and monopsony grounds.
I'm going to later talk about monopoly and monopsony, so I don't want to do it here.
But it's interesting that it's technically correct according to the neoclassical theory, which is wrong,
but it's incompatible with antitrust law.
In other words, they're being logically inconsistent with their own views in offering this argument,
Because on the one hand they're against so-called monopoly and on the other hand they're using, you know, the fact that the US is bigger than Costa Rica or something as a monopolistic element.
Then the word protectionism is interesting.
Who is protected? Not the Canadian or the American or the Costa Rican or the Japanese consumer,
but rather the producer who is competing with imports.
Tom DiLorenzo and Tom Woods will tell you that the main reason for the war of northern aggression,
or the war to prevent southern secession, sometimes called mistakenly the Civil War,
was over protectionism. The North had manufacturing, much more expensive than England, and the South wanted to import from England.
And the North didn't want them to import from England, they wanted them to import from New England or the northern colonies.
That's just another indication of tariffs lead to war. Not always, but certainly in that case.
Then there's the infant industries argument. What's the infant industries argument?
The infant industries argument is, okay, look, we agree protectionism is no good, free trade is good, but not right now.
First we got to get these infants to get on their feet, then we'll have free trade.
So let the manufacturing in New Jersey or New York or Massachusetts, let them have a little tariff protection for five or ten years, and then we'll open it up.
There are lots of problems with this. One of them is you get hundred-year-old infants because, you know, the infants are protected and they can come down to Washington and bribe everyone,
because they have a great reason the bribe because they'll make a lot of
money from having a tariff protection whereas each of us will just cost a
penny or two or three on rubber bands or paper clips or whatever it is so
there's a concentration of producers vis-a-vis consumers so the natural way
of these things is that the infants get organized and and you never get rid of
the infancy but let's suppose you do get rid of it isn't it true that every
Is every startup company is an infant when it first starts?
Look, I come to Auburn and I open up a hot dog stand.
Am I an infant? Yeah, I'm an infant. No one's ever heard of me.
I have to get the word out. I have to give out balloons or something.
So I'm an infant. So shouldn't the Auburn city subsidize me because I'm just an infant?
In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the infant industry's argument for a country
applies to every new company. So if you believe it for the nation and you want to be logical,
you should believe it for every individual company. Bill Gates started up Microsoft,
they should have given him a subsidy. Maybe I shouldn't keep going on like this because they'll get ideas.
They'll say, yeah, you know, we never thought of that. Got to subsidize every new company just for, you know,
10 years or so, which is fascism.
The point is, though, that if my hot dog stand makes that well and I make a profit,
who gets that profit? I do.
So why should you people be forced to pay for the infancy?
Every company has to start up.
I mean, the first day I open, it took me a month to, you know, rent the store or buy the store,
put in a hot dog dispenser, a mustard dispenser, whatever it is.
Before I even opened, I took in not one penny, and all I did was pay.
And now, the first day I opened, I'm going to finally get some money back.
But in my infancy, I was losing money.
So far I've showed you a lot of cartoons from the wrong book. Here's a good cartoon.
Mr. and Mrs. Average Canadian, watches Bill Cosby, an American on Sony, Japanese TV, eats Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Chinese, evil Chinese takeout,
wears Levi's and Calvin Klein's, thinks free trade will destroy the unique Canadian identity, drinks bug, Coke or Pepsi, sits on Scandinavian furniture, drives a Honda, walks on English wallabies.
Isn't that great? I mean, the hypocrisy. Needless to say, this cartoon did not come from that book.
This one I grabbed from somewhere.
Okay, here's another argument. It goes as follows. Okay, look, we buy the free trade argument.
You're right. You're right. You're right. We admit you're right.
However, those dirty rascals, they've got protectionism.
So we're only doing it in retaliation. In other words, it's bad to hit, but if someone hits you, you can hit back, right?
I mean, we're not pacifists. We believe in defense. So if they're going to have a tariff protection against our goods, shouldn't we have one against their goods?
What's fair is fair. And the answer that I offer for your consideration on this is if there are two guys in a rowboat and one shoots a hole in it,
Should the other guy shoot another hole?
It's problematic, to say the least.
And it's looking at things in terms of the nation.
Because if Japan, to pick out the evil Japanese,
if Japan is stupid enough not to allow us to export to them,
why should we be stupid enough to not allow us people
In other words, the American or the Canadian importers or the populace is innocent, so you're punishing innocent people for the crime of those guys.
Now don't get me wrong, I think it's wrong for them to have a tariff against our product, but it's silly for us to retaliate and have one against them.
Okay, there's a whole, boy, I've got a whole bunch of more stuff on this, but I'm almost out of time, and I didn't leave much time, because I didn't think there'd be many questions or discussions here.
In future times, I'll leave more time for discussion, and we can always talk around lunch or whatever, but are there any questions or comments or feedback?
Nothing? Well, I don't believe in wasting time. I've already wasted three minutes, so I'll give you more objections.
Ah, the Canadian culture. The Canadian culture will disappear if the U.S. is allowed to export stuff.
Here's where the CBC comes in. What the CBC does is have Canadian content laws.
In other words, if any station in America or any magazine in America has an American anything, they have to have a Canadian something.
So we have protectionism for Canadian artists.
So you get a whole bunch of movies like Lesbian Workers on a Railway or something.
Very, very boring.
You see, look, you know, every time the Olympics occurs, the Canadians are dismayed at the fact that the U.S. wins more medals than they do.
But the U.S. has got almost 300 million people. They've got almost 30. It's 10 to 1.
What they ought to do is say, okay, how do our medal count compare to, say, Ohio and Indiana's or something like that?
Because it's got about as many people there. Then it would be, you know, roughly equivalent.
On this importing of Canadian culture or importing foreign stuff, Bach and Mozart were foreigners.
The Beatles were foreigners to not be highbrow on this.
If we're going to be consistent about not importing foreign culture,
we shouldn't allow stuff to come in from, you know, Bach, Mozart, the Beatles,
I don't know, Van Gogh, whatever, Bram Brant, all these guys were dirty foreigners taking away drops from...
My view is that there's no demonstration that there's a distinct Canadian culture.
Most of what goes on there is subsidized.
Artists are very, very heavily subsidized.
It's sort of like a welfare class of artists.
Whereas happily in the US, they don't do that.
I mean, if you're going to be an artist, you have to make it on your own except for museums and stuff like that,
Stuff like that, which is a state publication.
The only artists that Canada has produced are maybe Mordecai,
Rickler, Tony Anly and Glenn Gould, who is one of my favorites.
Glenn Gould was magnificent.
But how many world-class people do you get?
Then there's the argument, well, OK.
If we let the other guys do the weed or whatever is the TV sets,
Because what they'll do is they'll do it, and then after we get rid of all of our Canadian banana manufacturing, they'll triple the price.
And the answer I have is, well, if you're so worried about that, keep your greenhouse going in case.
Or, you know, you could do the same thing domestically.
Don't let the Wal-Mart come in for different reasons, namely keep your own garden going because Wal-Mart, you know, one day might jack up the prices.
I mean, it's just a silly argument, but people do have it.
Okay, so in conclusion, I want to say that we have a free trade,
or stick our head in the sand like an ostrich,
be nationally self-sufficient, suspicious of foreigners, buy Canadian or buy American,
and I think the better way to go is to specialize, have a division of labor and trade,
and we can achieve peace, prosperity and abundance in that way. So thank you for your attention.