We need to thank Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for showing us the value of free trade. She is trying to sell $58 sweatshirts (some fundraising idea about eating the rich) while others are retailing similar things at $27. Her defense, and it’s an excellent one, is that these are made-in-America sweatshirts, provided by well-paying, good union jobs. Excellent: Now we know the price of having everything made by good union jobs, and it only requires halving our own incomes and lifestyles.
Republicans are freaking out bc we don’t use slave-wage labor for merch that funds grassroots organizing.
But what’s the difference between Trump’s merch and ours?
Ours is made in the US. ??
(& for GOP who joke that we shld give ? for free, we actually do – just volunteer ?) https://t.co/35DnbFYQyC
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 3, 2020
Our incomes are, in the only useful or true method of valuation, what we can consume. For $58, we can have one sweatshirt and also the warm comfy feeling that derives from knowing it was made by union labor in the good ‘ol USA. For $27, we can exploit sweatshop workers and also gain a sweatshirt. We can also, as Paul Krugman did many years ago, note that the sweatshops are the very thing lifting the poorest of the world out of destitution and up to those bourgeois pleasures of three square meals a day and a roof over their heads.
Having actually been out to the factories of Bangladesh, I’ll go with the second option. Not just because I’m cheap, mean, and exploitative, but because I think the injunction is to enrich the poor.
The decision to support the workers we share a country with halves the physical goods we can consume, even as it might increase that warmed-heart part. For here’s the important part of this: You don’t have to agree with me about which is better. The entire point of liberty is that you get to do as you wish, not as I or anyone else tells you to.
The free market part of that liberty is that each and every purchase you make is a decision about the world that you desire. What is it that makes you happier? In the economic jargon, what increases your utility? It is not true that the cheaper clothing is better. It’s that each method of production, by whom and where, contains a bundle of cloth, values, morals, and whatever. You should choose whichever makes you feel best.
Ocasio-Cortez would rather pay double for union-made products (presumably, not everyone can afford that luxury). I think that’s appalling — the best poverty reduction program ever is buying things made by poor people in poor countries. I might even have facts and logic on my side — as well as that Nobel Laureate Krugman. But neither of those matters. What does is whichever option you choose.
This is as true of President Trump’s steel tariffs as it is of mere sweatshirts. The imposition of a tariff is the assumption that we, out here, we consumers, will make the “wrong” decision. After all, why tax us for buying foreign if we’re all choosing the home-produced product anyway?
All of which is a defense of free markets. We, each of us, desire some different bundle of products and production methods. We, each of us, have the right to spend our own money as we wish to gain those desires. Thus, we must have free markets where we may make our choice. Free trade is just the observation that neither freedom nor markets stop at the border of the country.
It is the illustration of this that we should thank Ocasio-Cortez for. Some people are indeed happier paying $58 for a sweatshirt. Others prefer the $27 sweatshirt. A free society is the one in which we all get to do our own thing. Therefore, as proven here, a free society is one with free markets and free trade.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
