In recent days there has been a lot of comments about the madness of the most recent rates of President Trump, much of it well said by smarter men and women than me. Yet I thought I would throw a different perspective.
Leonard Leest Written famous I, pencil“ A story told from the first-person perspective of a pencil that describes the enormous attitude of knowledge that is needed to lead to its creation. One of the most important lessons of that essay is that the few seemingly modest components used to make a simple pencil – the “wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a little metal and a eraser” – each has its own family tree that extends further than all imagination and understanding. The wood requires “cedar of straight grain that grows in North California and Oregon,” that must be harvested with “sawing and trucks and rope and the countless other equipment.”
To get the tree, you must be used all this gear. But each of these used tools creates a new branch that has its own immensely complex family tree. Voor de zagen en vrachtwagens en andere gereedschappen moeten we voor elk van hen overwegen: “Alle personen en de talloze vaardigheden die in hun fabricage zijn gegaan: de mijnbouw van erts, het maken van staal en de verfijning ervan in zagen, assen, motoren, motoren; de groei van de hennep en het doorbrengen van alle voedsel en het staken van alle voedsel en het staken van alle voedsel en het staken van alle voedsel en het staken van alle voedsel en het staken van alle food.
Just try to find all the inputs needed to put a single tree splits into ten thousand different paths – and each of those own paths splits from the ten thousand paths, and so on. And this is exactly what is needed for cutting down trees. As soon as you consider that the “logs are sent to a mill in San Leandro, California”, you have new paths that split to take into account the “individuals make flat cars and rails and railway engines and who build and install and install the communication systems” for all this to work. And each of Thosone Inputs split just as well.
If you had a thousand lives, you could never fully detect and detect the full width of each task, source and form of knowledge that is needed up to this ever -increasing fractal. And as I mentioned in a previous post, if you become a little more complex than a pencil, such as the most basic and cheap toaster, things become even more complex. Although the pencil was made of just a few components, Thomas Thwaites was relieved to “discover that I had bought ninety -four in this object for only three pounds, four hundred different pieces were made of one hundred plus different materials.”
Don Boudreaux recently Is referred to data from Mark Perry showing that more than 60% of what the American import material and capital goods are that should be used as input for production. And each of these materials and capital goods have their own almost infinitely complex pedigree behind them, with the help of materials, capital and work from different countries. Every time governments use rates, they take every step where a good a national border exceeds this immeasurably complex web more expensive than usual, and filter those increased costs throughout the entire chain.
From the incomprehensible huge number of tools needed to make a cedar tree in wood that is suitable for a pencil, how many of those tools have been imported? Of the tools that were not imported, how many have been made of raw materials that were, with the help of machines that were imported (wholly or partly), created in factories that are at least partially built with imported materials, and so on? How many of those steps include something that exceeds a national border? Is it really wise to artificially increase the costs of each of these steps, in the hope that Americans can make a career to make the floor work in a toaster factory, or spend their days rotary trials In a telephone sling?
Prosperity does not come from making the things that people buy more expensive. Living standards are not increased by reducing the amount that people can afford to consume. If governments want to harm countries that they regard as hostile, do this to use economic sanctions to make it more expensive for those countries to introduce international trade. A rate is only a country that imposes economic sanctions on its own citizens.