A while ago I wrote a message in which the concern of Yoram Hazony was criticized that free trade, although generally good, can undermine the ties of mutual loyalty among citizens. My claim was that ‘mutual loyalty’ in itself does not give a positive reason to intranational preference over international trade:
Suppose I am looking for a house and I have to buy a certain amount for this. Walter, from the state of Washington, can offer me what I need for a certain price. Carl, the Canadian, can also offer me the same wood of the same quality, but the selling price of Carl is $ 35,000 lower. Under Vrijhandel I am free to prefer Walter to Carl, because I prefer to buy from an American, or I can also choose to buy Carl Over Walter to save a considerable amount. Presumably Hazony thinks that there is an obligation rooted in loyalty to buy from Walter about Carl, but it is not clear why. What Hazony evokes so often is the idea of mutual loyalty – And the thing about mutual loyalty is that it is mutual. The obligation goes in both directions. So why would we say that I don’t show Walter the right loyalty by buying at Carl? Why would you not say that Walter would not succeed in showing me the right loyalty, by insisting that I buy from him despite the enormous extra financial burden that it would impose me? Simply saying “mutual loyalty” does nothing to solve this.
This point of mine is not strict loss Hazony’s objection. In the best case, it only places things in a stalemate. As I have argued elsewhere, we need a kind of symmetry breaker to resolve such situations. For people whose worldview is in accordance with classical liberalism, it is easy to name individual freedom as breaking symmetry. But this would be insufficient if a response to the argument that Hazon makes. As part of his own argument and worldview, individual freedom cannot easily be thrown away as a trump card that cancel out any other consideration. As Hazony put it out
Conservatives, on the other hand, regard the freedom of the individual as a precious good to be cultivated and protected, but one that finds its place within a complex of competing principles that must be balanced against each other if the life of the nation must be maintained.
So for Hazony and his colleague thinkers, in such situations, there is more at the game that must be considered further than what the freedom of the individual maximizes. As a general discussion ring, it is unlikely that you make progress by giving answers to your conversation partner who require them to assume the truth of your own worldview and forgery. Responding to that argument by saying: “But we still have to prefer free trade because it maximizes individual freedom!” In this context, asking questions is the point under dispute. Hazony and Natcons more generally, do not deny that free trade would expand individual freedom more strongly. Their argument is rather that maximizing individual freedom can conflict with the mutual loyalty that keeps societies together, and in those cases these are two competing property that must be traded against each other.
There are two routes that I can see to respond to someone like Hazony in these cases. It is to move the argument to the question of whether or not individual freedom should have to Be a trump card, or must be maximized in all cases. The other is to claim that even within Hazony’s own worldview there are reasons to choose a system that makes it possible to buy wood from Carl across Walter – even encourage. It is this second scenario that I argue for here.
If two people want to communicate with each other in a way that not only regards their individual freedom to do what they want, but also factors in ties of mutual loyalty that bind them together, what would those two people want that? If Walter and I are motivated by tires of mutual loyalty, we would really like what is the best for each other. And this wish, if kept in an adult way, looks beyond what is best for one of us, only at the moment, or in an individual transaction. We would like what is best for each other in a more holistic and long -term way. We would be motivated by the sympathy about what Adam Smith wrote about, and that David Schmidtz was so elaborate in IS BOOK Live together:
Secondly, it is completely logical for the author whose first book was cingled as a primary deal of and then ask how they should respond to trading partners. Why, as a benevolent person who hopes to truck and batery with brewers and bakers, do you appeal to their self -love? Answer: Because you want them to be better off because they have come to you. Note that Smith does not say that bakers are exclusively motivated by self -love. He says we address ourselves Not to their benevolence but to their self -love (WN, Book I, Chapter 2). This is a reflection on our psychology, not theirs. He does not provide insight into Bakkers’ self -love, but in what it takes to be benevolent in our dealings with them.
Short, the author of Moral Gives a central phase to virtue and benevolence, but in working out what goodwill means, the author of Wealth of nations Labors it is obvious: namely, a man of true benevolence wants his partners to be better off with him than without him. The point of tackling the self -love of others is to give them to them. That is what it is like to succeed in someone’s attempt to be sympathetic.
So Walter and I would both consider more than what makes it one or the other better in a single transaction. We would like to work together within a system that makes both of us both in the long term – not only in this one transaction, but during our lives. And this is what a free trade system does. Looking at a static image, it may seem like Vrijhandel Walter would make even worse, because he would considerably lower his price or lose the sale of wood. But in a free trade system, Walter gets much more in the longer term than he loses. Walter can also use the widest possible selection of goods and services that have been done at the best possible prices.
Consider how, in particular, I would benefit under free trade in the wood transaction. I would get the benefit of the wood, plus I would be able to consume a considerable amount of extra goods and services with the money that I would save from the lower price. Or instead of increasing my consumption, I could set up the extra money on a pension account or at a university fund for my children. When I buy at Walter, I only get the wood and I lose the rest.
But this same situation applies to Walter, to all goods and services He also used. In a system of free trade, he gets all these benefits of all his purchases. The clothing he buys, the food he eats, the materials used to build all the sustainable goods he likes – in all these transactions he would win from free trade in the same way as I would win through free trade in wood in this one transaction.
But could Walter lose his job under free trade? It is possible, yes. Vrijhandel does not destroy or create jobs on the net in the long term. But it does change the makeup of jobs. As Alan Blinder put it, the effect of protectionism is not so much so much the saving of jobs as “Job Swapping. It protects jobs in some industries only by destroying jobs in others.” And because protectionism shifts to areas where goods and services are more expensive to produce in their own country, and away from jobs where American employees have a comparative advantage, it makes paying less productive and lower than they would otherwise be.
Finally, if Walter himself was motivated by mutual loyalty, he would take into account the costs that he imposes his fellow citizens by looking for protection for his industry. Research has consistently demonstrated that the costs imposed on American consumers in the forms of higher prices that greatly exceed the protected wages of employees are stored by protectionism. To quote from Blinder’s Essay above: “One study in the early 1990s estimated that American consumers paid $ 1,285,000 annually for each task in the luggage industry that was stored by obstacles for imports, an amount that greatly exceeds the average income of a luggage worker.”
Let’s be generous and assume that these luggage workers were paid very well – perhaps a salary of $ 250,000 a year. Even then, the costs imposed on those fellow citizens of employees are more than five times higher than the benefit they obtain. As someone really motivated by the benevolence Adam Smith, would I describe and motivated so well by a desire to honor a feeling of mutual loyalty, a policy supports my fellow citizens who are five times higher than the benefit I get? The answer seems to be a clear no to me. Just as “a man of true benevolence wants his partners to be better off than without him”, a man who is also motivated by mutual loyalty wants his fellow citizens to be better off with him than without him. It is no longer imposed on your fellow citizens who benefit your fellow citizens. It simply uses them for personal gain. And anyone who wants to honor ties of mutual loyalty among citizens must reject such behavior.