Thursday, January 29, 2004

 
"Arrr...call me 'Fish Pail.'"
Or: Life's A Beach

I suppose it was coincidental that the guy whom children reportedly compare to "Squidward" was amused by the beachy-keen, non-baleen death and demolition of the Tainan City Leviathan, one of a tribe of a natural enemy of ten-armed cephalopods. And so unlike the "optimist" of the classic Christmas story who quested for equestrian status by digging into a sack of pferde feces, and unlike the import-substituting, copyright crashing enterprising Taiwanese, the pessimistic Saxon failed to consider the possibility of transmuting guts into the gold of ambergris.
-brings back memories of a year spent in an academic frat house in the first year of a stint in a professional school. One of the guys was from Taiwan who had some royalty-free textbooks printed in his homeland. Off this point was "Lars"* a pale scion of the Scandinavian emigration to Minnesota who married a woman born in Taiwan. He was not amused by my asking if he would soon hear the "pitter-patter of little bound feet." I met him briefly many years later when he told me that he had (count 'em) *five* daughters. (true story- sigh..I had the knack of ticking folks off even some 30 years ago..)
Hmmmm....wonder if I can get a bootleg copy of "Prime Obsession"?
One shouldn't try to read too much into Taiwanese tea leaves regarding "Educating Derb"(I should take this moment in cybertime to quash rumours of the existence a pirated DVD, known to afficianandos as "Conjugating Derb's," starrng an underemployed at the time, British barbarian who went by the name of "Hairy Riemann.") and wishes that he could have distilled the difference between absolute and comparitive advantage in 25 words or less, but one hopes that he ain't sliding too much into the obscurity of Pat Buchanan types or even lending credibility to not-so-obscure Democrats who seem to favor severe restrictions on trade and very few on immigration. I don't even have the qualifications of a "hack" writer with respect to economics, but have at least a vague idea that an answer given to protestations that trade is not "fair" or "free" when dealing with icky countries is "So what?" -That is to say or assert that a country might benefit from trade even with countries that are foolish enough to restrict its own imports, subsidize its industries 'n agriculture and so forth. What has long bothered Yours Truly is that this is *not* obvious from back of the envelope speculations(two guys on an island, one of whom catches fish, the other gathers fruit who discover that another guy lives on a nearby island who also catches fish-who benefits? who loses? trying to "solve" this as one quickly discovers, involves making many conjectures about possibilities or impossibilities of expanding production, learning new trades etc.1, etc.2......etc.n.) I've read enough to have been bothered by at least some of the examples that JD cites regarding the apparent benefits of American and German protectionism, and can only speculate and hope that credible arguments have been made that the cause and effect case is itself speculative. That is, that the actual and potential talents and natural resources of America and Krautland were such that the rise of their industrial might would have happened anyway. There have certainly been arguments made in lay journals that Japan became powerful and prosperous more in spite of, than because of its "Industrial Policy." One must admit, though, that a policy of protecting "infant industries" hasn't always brought about stagnation. One the other hand,(I think it *was* Eric Sevareid who was parodied on the previous post but am not sure)perhaps the previous century would have been less bloody if trade and capital flows had been freer-even granting that trade amongst european countries was relatively free in those heady days of capitalism before WWI. On the other hand the Brits fretted only a little about damaging German "private property" during WWI and it's hard to imagine someone like Hitler worrying much about bombing London even if it was measled by thousands of German-owned or jointly-owned targets. On the other hand, would Japan have been much retarded in its post WWII development if it allowed sizeable and meaningful investment by Americans in its large corporations? It certainly might have been less *resented* by Americans in the last half of the 20th century. And there may have been something to the observation that the widespread practice of mercantilism-that is to say one in which industrialized countries refused to trade with one another were led to a struggle for captive markets or colonies for sources of natural resources and markets for their industrial goods. Gawd, this is awful, high school crap, but is it below the level of discourse in political journals and websites?

*name changed