A Question for Beck on Free Trade
Beck concludes his reasoning in favor of free trade and against protectionism with the following penultimate observation: "And it's better still if you can just buy the car from someone else and go about providing financial services to the guy who built the damn thing."
But is it really better? What if "someone else" decides for whatever reason to stop sending you cars, no matter the economic loss or, more accurately, lack of economic gain, to them? What good are your financial services then? It strikes me that a healthy society might want to retain the capacity to make cars as well as numerous other things that might be "outsourced" under fully-applied free trade dogma.