Free Trade: What Could Go Wrong? Part 2

Completing my take on What Could Go Wrong items 4 and 5

In the first post on this subject I listed “some things about "free market" economics that I don't like: 1) it leads to massive scale and centralization as enablers of efficiency, 2) ever more urbanization comes as night follows day; 3) it leads to long supply chains which are in my experience brittle and anything but economical were it not for fossil fuels; 4) it leads to specialization, from the individual level to the nation-state level; and 5) externalized costs, in other words costs that aren't reflected in price, like environmental degradation in all its forms, water pollution, air pollution, soil erosion, etc.” And I addressed numbers 1 through 3. Today I write on items 4 and 5.

Number 4: Specialization

We all specialize to a great or lesser extent; my specialties now are the provision of sawmill services and pure maple syrup products, these are in effect my “cash crops.” The cash is then a medium of exchange for purchasing those things we don’t produce for ourselves. Of course we are taking on more, including most importantly at this point the production of food. In the modern sense we are a lot less specialized than most, and in fact a lot less specialized than we ourselves were just a few years ago. To specialize less was a conscious decision, as I wrote about in my first Primal Woods blog post.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein