Lefties are deeply upset to discover that their labor is of so little value that they can be literally replaced for nothing:
#LAWeekly fired their staff in favor of unpaid “contributors.” If you are an aspiring writer, and you submit to them, you are insuring it becomes impossible to make a living in this field. – Jennifer Wright
As with music, just because you love something so much that you’d do it for free, doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to be paid for your hard work that makes other people money. – Zack Stentz
See, the problem is supply and demand. The labor theory of value is false. There is no intrinsic value in one’s labor that merits automatic compensation. In cases such as this, the value of the channel greatly exceeds the value of the indistinguishable content flowing through it.
We have firsthand experience of this. We have a perfectly functioning store that sells – or as is increasingly the case, sold – ebooks that are superior to the ebooks that Amazon sells. Unlike Amazon, we don’t DRM the epubs sold there, whereas Amazon converts exactly the same epub into a proprietary format that can only be read on a Kindle device or application. The price is exactly the same.
And yet, we sell literally 100 times more books through Amazon because that is how people almost uniformly prefer to buy them. In fact, we have learned that we even do better giving Amazon exclusive distribution rights and permitting them to give books away to its KU subscribers and then compensate us for those who actually read them at about one-half the page rate that would be equivalent to a book sale than we do selling our books on our own store. More than three times better.
Of course, this preference for the dominant channel will sooner or later lead to the usual monopoly-related problems, which is why we will continue to maintain our digital storefront. But as long as the channel is more valuable than the content, content providers will be at risk by those willing to provide cheaper, or even free, substitutes. And the more that content is readily available, the less one is going to be compensated for it.
Steve Keen may have disproved the inescapability of the Law of Supply & Demand, but that doesn’t mean it is never relevant, only that it may not always be applicable to a given situation. But in this particular case, there is clearly more demand for free labor than there is for expensive labor. The writers and musicians affected would be wise to contemplate why their work is so easily replaced by free substitutes; the irony is that the free music available today is often superior in quality to that for which one must pay up front.
Case in point: Erock’s instrumental version of Let It Go is a joyful thing of beauty that surpasses Leo Moracchioli’s very good metal cover, and both of them are far more interesting than the Disney-published version available in the stores. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a better combination of technical pyrotechnics with staying completely within the melodic framework of a song. Note to aspiring young guitarists: if you want to make an unforgettable impression on the girls in your town, learn to play this.
This is an excerpt from The Wrath of Angels. It is not necessary to read either The War in Heaven or The World in Shadow first. In fact, I’m not even sure if it is advisable to do so. This series is not my best fiction, but more than a few readers have enjoyed it. Thirty miles south of London, there is a garden park located on the edge of the Sussex Weald. It is a quiet place, and beautiful, graced by a chain of five lakes linked by waterfalls. Only a few paces outside the park’s boundaries, three trees stood next to each other in a single row, two chestnuts and a mighty oak, with branches interlocking and knobby roots digging deep into the rich, loamy dirt of the quiet forest. Such a sight would not normally occasion any cause for comment, except for the fact that ten seconds ago, the area on which they stood had been largely devoid of vegetation, with the exception of a solitary ceanothus, the continued thriving of which looked less than promising in light of how its access to the sun had been unexpectedly curtailed.
Two squirrels, which had been happily occupied with chasing each other’s tails until the sunlight suddenly vanished, pulled up from their sport in some confusion. They were quite familiar with the location of every nut-bearing tree in the immediate vicinity, and even to their diminutive rodent minds it seemed implausible to the point of impossibility that they could have somehow overlooked the massive acorn-producing factory that now towered over their furry grey heads.
The smaller of the two squeaked quizzically at his companion, who sat back on his haunches with an expression of overt skepticism that would have been comprehensible even to an observer who did not happen to be a member of the greater sciurus family. The small squirrel was not to be dissuaded, though, not with the promise of what appeared to be the finest unmarked claim that southeastern English squirreldom had seen in five generations.
His nose quivered, then he cautiously took a step towards the giant oak. Then another, and a third, followed by a little leap that brought him within a single bound of the great tree. An ill-timed gust of wind caused its branches to rustle threateningly, and the second squirrel chirped a warning which encouraged his more adventurous friend to think twice about venturing the giant on the first go. Instead, he scrambled up the leftmost tree, the taller of the two chestnuts, and edged out on a limb that would bring him to within inches of one of the mighty oak’s lower branches.
He never made it, though. Without warning, without even the smallest breath of wind, the limb on which he was crouching twitched violently and sent him tumbling head-over-tail to the ground eight feet below. No sooner had the surprised rodent touched the ground than he was scampering off for the protection of more familiar trees, more proper trees, trees which held still as trees were supposed to hold still, and suffered the pitter-patter of little feet with forbearance. Only slightly behind him was his friend, who was squawking angry imprecations over his shoulder as he retreated hastily.
“Oh, that’s not nice,” commented the tree, now sans squirrels.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” muttered the other chestnut.
“I couldn’t help it, those tiny claws, they tickle!”
“You have to relax, be the tree.”
“I don’t believe everyone is quite as accustomed to the need to hide from pursuit as you, Puck,” commented the oak in a deep oakish bass. “So, what do we do now?”
“We wait. Beowaesc will be here soon, I’m sure. I told him I might be needing to lie low for a while, and this is a good place to do it. No one ever comes here except the woodland spirits and tempters stuck watching over the occasional eco-freak. He’ll probably have noticed our arrival, and if not, those disgusting little squeakers will probably run right to him anyhow.”
“They’re not disgusting,” protested the first chestnut. “Their feet just tickle, that’s all.”
“Rats with tails,” insisted the other chestnut, shaking its branches. “Don’t be fooled by the cute fluffy act, it’s nothing but a charade. If you’d ever been a tree before—”
“Silence!” The oak commanded an end to the discussion. “One comes.”
An outline of a face appeared on the bark of the chestnut tree. The face resembled Robin’s, in the same way that a face pressed up against a bed sheet resembles the face of the person behind the bed sheet. It was not entirely recognizable, but as Robin had said, Beowaesc was expecting him. And then, Beowaesc was more than a little accustomed to differentiating between one tree and another.
“Ah, so there you are. You don’t know much about trees, do you, Puck.”
“Er… a good day to you, my lord. Why do you say that?”
Beowaesc was a tall forest god, with richly hued skin that shone like varnished beech. His well-kept beard was mahogany and of middling length, and his eyes, filled with the ancient wisdom of the woods, were set deep into his craggy face. He carried a neatly polished staff, and his bare feet were so hard and horny that Robin pitied any poor boots forced to protect the earth from them should he ever choose to wear a pair. Antlers sprang from his forehead, not a great stag’s rack like the Hunters, but a humbler pair of three-tined horns. Like his forest, Beowaesc had a touch of civilization about him, and yet there was a sense of earthy power radiating from him even so.
The forest lord pointed to the blue-flowered tree shrouded by their branches. “It’s quite simple. No ceanothus could ever grow to such heights enshrouded by the likes of you three. Anyone who knows the first thing about vegetation would know something was amiss. Why, even a mortal would have noted it!”
A look of chagrin crossed the bark face. Robin’s lips twisted in an expression of frustration, and in the blink of an eye, the chestnut disappeared and he was himself again, albeit clad in an appropriately woodsy brown robe.
“You make it sound so obvious!”
“It is, if you know what to look for.”
“Very well, what would you advise, then, should we seek to avoid drawing unwanted attention.”
Beowaesc stroked his beard and smiled at Robin, as if he were a favored nephew. “Why don’t you introduce your companions to me first? Then, I shall advise you as to a suitable locale. There is a pleasant glen with a lovely view of the main waterfall not far from here. It’s only about a five minute walk. I’ve spent many a pleasant season there.”
Robin tried not to roll his eyes. A season? And more than once? This was not his first time as a tree, nor even his twentieth, but it was a guise he wore only out of necessity. It was mind-crushingly boring, for one thing, and for another, Lahalissa was right. Squirrel feet tickled something terrible. “How very kind,” he answered, leaving his thoughts unvoiced. “This is Lahalissa, in service to… a Shadow Lady of some note known as Dr. Sprite.”
“Indeed,” Beowaesc nodded politely as the second chestnut transformed before him. As Robin hoped, the forest lord had no knowledge of the world of mortal academics and would ask no dangerous questions. Beowaesc smiled in appreciation, though, as the lovely daemoness curtsied to him wearing a leafy woodland outfit that honored his position as well as her figure. “The aspect suits you well, my dear. Be welcome in my weald, Lahalissa.”
“Thank you, Great Lord,” she breathed submissively.
“And this—”
“Oh, no. No, no, no.” Beowaesc’s eyes widened and he backed away from the place where the giant oak had stood only a moment before. “That’s not possible. It can’t be!”
“So you recognize your rightful liege, old friend?” said Oberon, and his voice was like frost running down the edge of a sword blade. “Or perhaps you have forgotten oaths sworn long ago, sworn by Rose and Thorn.”
A reader writes about how convergence ruled his church:
The first time I corresponded with you was last year, in which I asked advice about a church which brought in a San Francisco 49er for one of their sermons. The entire point of the sermon was to lecture the congregation on how Colin Kaepernick was doing God’s work by kneeling for the anthem– not scriptural in the least. They followed a pattern of social justice convergence: firing pastors who were more scholarly in biblical works, hiring a woman to preach once a month, bringing in a more “diverse” congregation intentionally to replace the faithful. My wife and I walked out on the church and never returned. The advice you gave was to take charge of the spiritual matters of my family, as a man should, and on my end, as I’ve turned to Him, God has bestowed us with blessings beyond anything I could have imagined this year.
However, the converged church is not faring so well. They used to be one of the largest churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by all accounts they are failing hard. Attendance has dropped drastically. They’ve lost most of the actual “doers” on their staff to other churches. They’ve replaced most paid staff with volunteers who aren’t as competent. The church used to have its own coffee shop which it has now closed down because it no longer can sustain itself. In the space of one year since veering off into social justice, it has destroyed itself.
Social justice leads to complete ruin every time. Thought you might like an update.
I can’t say I’m surprised. The death knell is the female preachers. I don’t know why, exactly, but once a church reaches that point, you can rest assured that it isn’t coming back.
I so despise the sort of midwit who leaps upon every possible opportunity to “correct” someone in order to show off how smart he is, and in doing so, demonstrates his own ignorance. Add in a dash of smug passive-aggression if you want to maximize the annoyance factor. Here is a suggestion: if you think I’ve gotten something wrong, look it up. If the 14 years of this blog serve as a reliable guide, there is about a 98 percent chance you are wrong.
VD: We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents
valiance: The way *Marius* treated his political opponents, surely?
At the end of 82 BC or the beginning of 81 BC, the Senate appointed Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constituendae causa (“dictator for the making of laws and for the settling of the constitution”). The “Assembly of the People” subsequently ratified the decision, with no limit set on his time in office. Sulla had total control of the city and republic of Rome, except for Hispania (which Marius’s general Quintus Sertorius had established as an independent state). This unusual appointment (used hitherto only in times of extreme danger to the city, such as during the Second Punic War, and then only for 6-month periods) represented an exception to Rome’s policy of not giving total power to a single individual. Sulla can be seen as setting the precedent for Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, and for the eventual end of the Republic under Augustus.
In total control of the city and its affairs, Sulla instituted a series of proscriptions (a program of executing those whom he perceived as enemies of the state). Plutarch states in his “Life” of Sulla (XXXI): “Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit”, further alleging that many of the murdered victims had nothing to do with Sulla, though Sulla killed them to “please his adherents”.
“Sulla immediately proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate. As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as many. In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.” -Plutarch, Life of Sulla (XXXI)
The proscriptions are widely perceived as a response to similar killings which Marius and Cinna had implemented while they controlled the Republic during Sulla’s absence. Proscribing or outlawing every one of those whom he perceived to have acted against the best interests of the Republic while he was in the East, Sulla ordered some 1,500 nobles (i.e., senators and equites) executed, although it is estimated that as many as 9,000 people were killed. The purge went on for several months. Helping or sheltering a proscribed person was punishable by death, while killing a proscribed person was rewarded with two talents. Family members of the proscribed were not excluded from punishment, and slaves were not excluded from rewards. As a result, “husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, sons in the arms of their mothers”. The majority of the proscribed had not been enemies of Sulla, but instead were killed for their property, which was confiscated and auctioned off. The proceeds from auctioned property more than made up for the cost of rewarding those who killed the proscribed, making Sulla even wealthier. Possibly to protect himself from future political retribution, Sulla had the sons and grandsons of the proscribed banned from running for political office, a restriction not removed for over 30 years.
I have to admit, the low percentage of cancer money dedicated to researching pediatric cancers kind of shocked me.
Joey Bosa, defensive end, Los Angeles Chargers. The other day, I was discussing with Bosa a column he was doing for The MMQB about a teenage boy he’d met in Houston, Sean, who had twice beaten cancer. Bosa decided to let Sean design his cleats for “My Cause, My Cleats,” the program in which the league allowed players to wear cleats designed to promote whatever cause is nearest and dearest to them. Bosa decided on pediatric cancer. So instead of asking Bosa for his Most Valuable Possession, I’ll let him pen his feelings about his Most Valuable Cleats, designed by his high-school buddy.
“Sean educated me on a lot of things about cancer. He told me, ‘Did you know that out of all the money raised for cancer research, only 4 percent goes to pediatric cancer?’ That just shocked me. That is not my world at all. I never even thought of it. I just thought how unfair that seemed. Four percent? Four percent? That just made a huge impact on me … I asked Sean if he wanted to design my cleats this year. I think he was pretty excited about it. I connected him with my rep at adidas, and I let Sean do whatever he wanted. You probably know breast cancer is pink. Pediatric cancer is gold. So they came up with these cleats.
“It’s Sean’s message to the cancer community: CHILDREN DESERVE #MORETHAN4. I love it. I think it’s fantastic. And I hope America gets to see his message from coast to coast.”
That’s ridiculous. It makes no sense to devote so much research and health care money to old people who have already lived their lives at the expense of children who haven’t had the opportunity to live them yet. The NFL should trade pink for gold.
The NFL is doing a lot that is wrong and is justly suffering the consequences of Roger Goodell’s stupid decisions. But one recent initiative I do like is the way they are permitting the players to use their cleats to support various causes.
It is possible – POSSIBLE – that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has not been as completely useless as he has appeared to be for most of this year.
Did you know the DOJ has been investigating the FBI for 11 months…. wait, what?
Hold-up on the criticism folks. Three important statements today from the DOJ, FBI and OIG indicate there have been ongoing investigations and reviews of conduct within the upper tiers of leadership within the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Given the nature of the leaked IG investigation to the Washington Post and New York times; surrounding apex investigator and deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI Peter Strzok; and accepting the direct approach of President Trump in his tweets toward that revelation; and adding the layer of Intel Chairman Devin Nunes threatening to file ‘contempt of congress charges‘; there is every indication something is about to break – very soon….
It would be prudent to withhold negative opinion of AG Sessions and FBI Director Wray until we can see the outcome of the Inspector General findings – which will, given the duration of the investigation, likely be a very lengthy and extensive report.
All of a sudden the recent FBI leaks to the Washington Post and New York Times make more sense. All of the embedded political agents within the DOJ and FBI are quite possibly about to be exposed. This would explains a lot of the current activity and visible angst from within the participants of the professional administrative state.
This year-long OIG investigation could possibly explain a great deal of the current headlines on all sides of the DC spectrum. The black hats are on the cusp of being exposed.
In other words, there may be even more winning than was hitherto suspected. We’ll see. Regardless, still not tired. Drain the Swamp. Build the Wall.
James Delingpole observes that the God-Emperor is playing both the media and the European political elite like puppets in his ongoing defense of Western Civilization:
It might seem a stretch to argue that Trump’s recent trio of trolling retweets of Muslims-behaving-badly videos have much to do with this noble mission.
But cometh the man, cometh the hour. President Trump is no ordinary leader and he most certainly does not play by the conventional rules.
A key facet of his modus operandi is the way he manages to bypass a generally hostile media and speak directly to his constituency – essentially ordinary people who’ve had just about enough of politically correct nonsense – using social media.
Straight laced conservatives deplore this. They think it’s undignified. Even that it trivializes the presidential office and undermines Trump’s mission.
On the contrary, as Vox Day persuasively demonstrates in his new book SJWs Always Double Down, Trump wields Twitter like a cross between a surgeon’s scalpel and a theater commander’s Daisycutter bomb.
So, cut to the chase, what was Trump doing with these tweets?
First, let’s just establish what he was NOT doing:
Winning the hearts and minds of radical Muslims; making liberals love and respect him more; getting nice coverage in the Guardian and the New York Times; persuading Never Trumpers that they might have misjudged him; winning over Theresa May and the rest of the faux-Conservative political class.
No. Trump doesn’t give a damn for any of these people. (And who can blame him?)
Instead he was sending a message to the people he cares about: all those ordinary people out there, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and beyond, who are shocked, appalled, scared by the way their countries are slowly (or quite quickly in the case of some countries, Sweden, for example) surrendering to Islam; who feel betrayed by the pusillanimity of their political leaders and let down by the failure of most of their media to report on the rapes and the sexual grooming and the violence being committed disproportionately by Muslims, both immigrants and home-grown radicals; who feel unable to speak – except in embarrassed whispers – about their fears about being stabbed or machine-gunned or blown up or mown down by yet another jihadist simply for the crime of going about their daily, Western life; who bitterly resent being tarred as Islamophobic or xenophobic or uncaring when all they want is to be allowed to live their life in peace in a country whose traditions, laws and cultural values remain the ones they grew up with and which make their homeland worth living in.
These are the people Trump was reaching out to with those tweets.
As for the rest – all those politicians and media types and cry bully activist groups – they just fell into Trump’s trap.
Trump wanted them to react in the way they did. It was part of his strategy. If you don’t understand why – if you’re one of those “sophisticated” analysts who persists in persuading yourself that Trump is just an idiot, in the way the same people used to say about Ronald Reagan – then, again, I recommend you spend time reading Vox Day’s book.
But if you want the short version, ask yourself this: how do you think most ordinary people – the ones outside the politically correct politics/media bubble – responded when they saw the president’s tweets?
Did they go
a) “I heard some people on the BBC tell me that Britain First are far right and far right is, like, the worst thing ever. So by retweeting them Donald Trump was literally endorsing fascism!”
or
b) “Trump gets it. Why don’t the other politicians get it?”
I suspect it’s mainly the latter.
Mainly? Most certainly! For me, one of the most significant aspects of Trump’s much-protested retweets is that he has clearly learned that playing go-along-to-get-along will be fatal for him. He’s not trying to please Theresa May. He’s not trying to please Jean-Claude Juncker. He’s not trying to please any of the sex criminals in the media, either in the US or the UK.
Why should he? He is the champion of the people, the vox populi, and he is standing up for them against the modern-day, self-appointed Optimates. We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents.
From the most recent reviews of SJWs Always Double Down, still the #1 Political Philosophy bestseller:
Great book. I especially enjoyed the portion explaining the fallacies with the given examples. Does tend to be a little dry at times, but a good read nevertheless.
Vox Day is an excellent author. Subject well researched and presented. I am learning a lot!
Five Stars. Eye opening. Well written.
If you have read the first installation in this series – SJWs Always Lie – you know what to expect. But perhaps you might think that you already know what is in this book. Well, yes and no. A lot of the stuff will be familiar to those who have followed the SJW wars, but the tactical and strategic details spelled out in the different chapters on how to identify, resist and deal with SJW infiltrators is worth the price. Even after participating, the section on the strategic thinking behind the Puppies’ takedown of the Hugo Awards was an eye opener for me.
Knowing how SJW’s infiltrate and destroy organizations from within is invaluable information in an age where virtue-signaling is more important that delivering products and services.
Since Christmas is coming, it may be worth remembering that both SJWAL and SJWADD are now available in paperback, so it’s easy to put them in the hands of family members and colleagues who you suspect may be targeted by SJWs in the coming year. Or better yet, who happen to be in a position to do something about the SJWs already infesting their organizations.
Remember, 2018 is the year that SJWs and the rest of the Left are going to be amping up the rhetoric and the political intensity in the hopes of taking back some of the ground they’ve lost since 2015. We can safely expect the temperature of the cultural cold war, and the number of metaphorical casualties, to rise as a result.
It never ceases to amaze me how these idiots read a single paragraph I have written on a subject and then assume that it comprises the totality of my thoughts on the matter. Yesterday’s emailer, Donny, decides to come back for more
I see that you have published my email to you and John. Well, that’s fine. I wish I had clarified that my public service at a community college was in addition to my regular job (commodities trader) and those eleven years ended twenty years ago. You and some of your commenters had fun with that.
To the matter at hand, John’s speech at Mencken asked: “I’d like to see a good logical proof of the proposition that free trade requires free movement of peoples.”
Your November 9th post (which I discovered from a link in John’s December 1st posting) responded in two paragraphs. In the first you write “free trade requires the free movement of peoples.” No, it doesn’t, except in a pedantic “by definition” sense. As commenter Austin Ballast said, “You still have blinders on VD. Free trade in goods does not require free trade in people, assuming people are not the goods.”
Without regard to minutia such as one commenter’s (SAK) concern for a foreign nation making the chips in our missiles, the big picture on trade is that it is beneficial to both parties trading. That big picture remains even if we tighten against visa over-stayers, chain-migration and Rio Grande swimmers.
In your second paragraph you speak of “maximum efficiencies theoretically provided” and “maximum growth potential” but less than maximum is still mutually beneficial in the big picture sense. I made these points in my email to John which I copied to you as a matter of courtesy, since the two of you are so deferential to each other.
In response to my email, you ask, “what two points is the clueless professor failing to take into account here?” as if simply asking makes your points. Again, Austin Ballast, “VD, you treat this idea more as an axiom than something you have really proven. That is a basic flaw. It may seem obvious to you, but that does not make it true.”
Then you ask, “where is the evidence that free trade in goods without free trade in labor is even materially possible” which is facile. I agree that visa over-stayers, chain-migration and Rio Grande swimmers are a challenge, but why does that prevent the trade of a container of computers for Africa in exchange for a sum of gold?
Your bullying manner may appeal to the members of your audience with a sadistic bent but I am not distracted from the fact that you have been twice unresponsive to the challenge John posed: “I’d like to see a good logical proof of the proposition that free trade requires free movement of peoples.”
It’s not so much that I am sadistic as these stubborn ignoramuses tend to be masochistic. Donny isn’t distracted from the fact that I’m repeatedly unresponsive to demands to provide a good logical proof of the proposition that water is wet. Just as being wet is an attribute of water, the free movement of labor is an intrinsic attribute of free trade. What Donny complains is a “pedantic ‘by definition’ sense” is literally what free trade is. Every argument, every economic law, that supports the free trade in x also supports free trade in y. All of them. No exceptions.
Austin Ballast’s comment is particularly stupid. He is projecting the blinders he mentions, because his statement is simply irrelevant. He might as well have said “free trade in cars does not require free trade in computers.” But it does, for the obvious reason that if you are engaged in trading cars without restriction but restricting trade in computers, you are not engaged in free trade. You are simply doing what nearly all states have done for all of human history in restricting the trade in some goods while permitting it in others.
What Donny and some other advocates of “free trade in goods, but not capital, services, or labor” want is to be able to draw the line in a different place than other trade protectionists, but dishonestly avail themselves of the rhetoric of free trade and the ability to appeal emotionally to the language of freedom and liberty.
But as he has asked for an actual proof, I will provide him with a logically unassailable one, one with which he will quibble, but in vain. After all, what can be easier than to prove that water is wet?
The sole justification for distinguishing in economic theory between domestic and foreign trade is to be found in the fact that in the case of the former there is free mobility of capital and labor, whereas this is not true with regards to the commerce between nations.
The basis for restricting the free trade in goods between nations is an invisible judicial line that separates one nation from the other.
The same logic and ethics apply to people who want to trade on both sides of the invisible judicial line known as a national border, which renders this basis for restricting the free trade in goods between nations both false and illegitimate.
Because the basis for restricting the free trade in goods between nations is false and illegitimate, it cannot logically or ethically restrict that free trade in goods.
This invisible judicial line that cannot logically or ethically restrict the free trade in goods between nations does not magically materialize when labor and capital cross it.
Therefore, there is no legitimate justification for distinguishing between domestic and foreign trade in economic theory.
Therefore, any logical, ethical, or theoretical argument for the free trade in goods encompasses the free trade in capital and labor as well.
Those who are sufficiently well-educated in economics will recognize the sources of at least three of those points as well as their impeccably free trade credentials. Unlike Donny and Austin, I do not attack strawmen of my own imagination, but rather, the actual arguments made by the strongest proponents.
What both of them failed to grasp is that simply mentioning the fact that there are beneficial aspects to free trade, limited or not, does not mean that free trade is net beneficial, even if it is limited only to goods or a given set of goods. I do not deny that free trade benefits certain parties, the point is that it also harms other parties whose costs are never factored into the equation. The point that I was making when I referred to the maximum efficiencies provided is that the argument for economic efficiency to which free traders so often appeal – free trade is good for the economy – necessarily and intrinsically includes the free movement of labor and capital. If one is going to appeal to the good of the economy as a whole without considering the costs to various elements of the economy, then it is every bit as reasonable to argue for the free movement of labor combined with restricting the movement of goods as it is to argue the reverse.
Indeed, if we are to use GDP as our primary metric as so many free trade advocates do, one can make a considerably stronger case for free trade in labor combined with a restricted trade in goods than one can for the reverse.
