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45 sats \ 19 replies \ @optimism 18 May \ on: The Strange Moral Relativism of "Free Trade" econ
You cannot centrally plan morals or the weight of them upon peoples decisions. You're free to have an opinion about it tho: judge me for using cheap products from China like the 1.6M sats phone I am typing this reply from, or the cheap 4yo MBP - that I paid 17M sats for at the time -that I could have written this from. My problem is though that I have no alternatives that fit my requirements in these cases.
If there are western made products that fit my requirements or even almost fit it - my hardest requirements are around security and durability - I'd happily pay a premium even for similar quality. But the alternative has to be there and it has to be real: building new sweatshops in the US to create the same item but then overpriced isn't an improvement.
I'm not judging anyone for these consumer decisions. I'm just noting how some of the arguments people use seem to be incongruous.
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What is a market other than the running product of supplier and consumer decisions though?
I know I'm looking at this way too pragmatically but assuming that we aim for as-free-as-possible trade, what tools are there other than (a) being the change, or (b) influencing people?
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The point is that taxes and subsidies aren’t market mechanisms, so “free trade” with such regimes is not inherently free enterprise.
I don’t even know what I’d want to persuade anyone to do about this, short of convincing the CCP to knock it off.
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Isn’t trade done by individuals that make rational decisions to gain (on both sides) by making that trade? If it is individuals making the decisions then it is a free market, isn’t it? If it the individuals making the decisions they would take into account everything they thought important, wouldn’t they?
I don’t think you have to persuade the CCP to “knock it off” because if they continue, they will crash their economy with bad decisions and malinvestments. Then they can start over as the people desire.
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If you're getting a great deal on what you know to be stolen goods, isn't something other than free trade going on?
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Yes, something else, criminal, is going on. Do you know, beforehand, that the goods are stolen, if so, you are part of the crime and therefore a criminal. I won’t even go into a pawn shop because I do not know the providence of the goods in the shop.
And, yes, it is something else than free trade, it is fencing of stolen goods. If you get caught, you get treated much the same as the thief. I guess you are saying that anything subsidized is the product of theft, then, right? Wow, that would make any agricultural product from here a product of theft, too.
I'd say that's not an action against free trade but one against NAP (indirectly, by rewarding aggression against someone else's property).
Free trade is the whole, a system.Perhaps the fact that free trade also works for stolen goods is a feature and not a bug? Just like it is for Bitcoin?
PS: thanks for keeping this discussion alive