A cura di @Billy Pilgrim.

Con un editoriale sul New York Times, Veronique De Rugy (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) ripercorre le decisioni di Donald Trump in materia di commercio internazionale, e argomenta la tesi secondo la quale il libero commercio avvantaggia uno Stato, anche quando messo in pratica unilateramente:

Economists since Adam Smith have understood that free trade is the best policy. Studies show that countries with freer trade have both higher per-capita incomes and faster rates of productivity growth. Economists have also long understood that barriers to trade, while pitched as a way to help domestic workers, always heavily penalize domestic consumers. For instance, when Uncle Sam imposes stiff barriers on sugar imports to protect a few hundred producers in Florida and Louisiana from competition, these farmers’ gains come at the larger expense of consumers who are obliged to pay more than twice the world price of sugar, on average, each year since at least 1982.

[…]

Yes, the world would be a better place if there were no trade barriers at all. But the United States shouldn’t abolish its barriers only if China, Canada or others abolish theirs. As the economist and Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman explained in an academic journal, “The economist’s case for free trade is essentially a unilateral case: A country serves its own interests by pursuing free trade regardless of what other countries may do.”

Mr. Krugman also lamented that economists “must deal with a world that does not understand or accept that case” for unilateral free trade. That becomes clearer by the day: Now so-called free traders seem to believe that the president’s $50 billion of tariffs on imports from China is part of a brilliant strategy to get the Chinese to open their markets to American exports. Similarly, they applaud Mr. Trump for starting a trade war with G-7 countries toward the goal of a tariff-free G-7.

Even if Canada never removes its 270 percent tariffs on our dairy products, Americans would gain if Uncle Sam, regardless of Ottawa’s trade policies, unilaterally removed not only the steel and aluminum tariffs it just slapped on Americans who buy Canadian metal but also ended all tariffs on imports from Canada.

Immagine da Phxere.