This article was previously published on the Learn Liberty blog.
Cafe Hayek’s Quotation of the Day prompts the following thought experiment. Suppose that house burglars take to heart the economic ‘logic’ of Donald Trump’s and other mercantilists’ arguments about trade: how would these burglars burgle?
The answer is clear. Here’s an account of a world of mercantilist burglars.
Mercantilist burglars spend long hours and many of their own resources building furniture, crafting fine jewelry, and manufacturing high-quality consumer electronics. The mercantilist burglars then break into strangers’ homes and deposit these goods throughout those homes. Importantly, the mercantilist burglars never take anything at all from the strangers’ homes.
Immediately before exiting from the strangers’ homes, the burglars leave their mailing addresses, confident that the strangers whose homes have been mercantilist-burgled will send to these burglars notes on paper expressing their – the homeowners’ – wish to repay with different goods the mercantilist burglars. But the proud mercantilist burglars have no sympathy for their ‘victims’ and proudly refuse to fall for these crafty efforts of their ‘victims’ to eliminate the gains that the mercantilist burglars are confident they – the burglars’ – have won by depositing lots of goods in their ‘victims” homes.
What counts as a victory?
With deep satisfaction and ever-swelling senses of superiority, the mercantilist burglars accumulate these thank-you notes sent by these burglars’ ‘victims,’ but these burglars never, ever as much as think to actually use these note to get any goods from the ‘victims’ of their burglary. The mercantilist burglars compete with each other to see which of them accumulates over time the largest number of such thank-you notes from their ‘victims.’ The burglar who accumulates the largest number of such notes wins, for it is he who obviously has deposited in strangers’ homes more furniture, fine jewelry, and high-quality consumer electronics than has any other burglar and who has most steadfastly exercised the muscular and manly will-power to refuse ever to accept from any ‘victim’ any goods in return.
This winning burglar declares himself to be “great.” All the other burglars look upon this winning burglar with a mix of admiration and envy. They all commit to redouble their efforts to make themselves great again by depositing record numbers of goods in strangers’ homes without ever taking anything from the strangers whose homes they mercantilist-burgle.
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Edited by Russell Coates
This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.
