Free Trade: What Could Go Wrong?

Even optimally implemented as it turns out, a lot can go wrong, and has.

In Newsletter 160 of 2022 Mar 05 I wrote:

There are 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. Be that as it may, that's how the world works, which is why I/we have to at least some extent opted out of "the world," that is a trend in our lives that I don't see ending.

The economic principles I am discussing are available in Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics, which I highly recommend. So let’s walk through this step by step in a bit more detail.