Trade embargoes with the world's poor.

I encounter a lot of offensive arguments in my wheelings and dealings, but the one that I find making me the angriest is that we should put embargoes on trade with the world's poor "for their own good."

Bernie Sanders advanced that repugnant position and now I'm seeing it like clockwork from the Trumpkins as well. Global extreme poverty has been cut in HALF over the past several years thanks to market liberalisations and trade in the developing world.

If you think American workers are more important than workers in Bangladesh then say that and own your nationalist bigotry. Don't dare say that you want to steal the jobs from millions of poor people around the world because it's better for them that way.

Now I'll turn it over to a Nobel Laureate in Economics who had this to say:

"The advantages of established First World industries are still formidable. The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labour. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favour to its alleged beneficiaries."

You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe--although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggests that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materialising. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course--but they won't, or at least not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialisation based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard--that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.

"In short, my correspondents are not entitled to their self-righteousness. They have not thought the matter through. And when the hopes of hundreds of millions are at stake, thinking things through is not just good intellectual practice. It is a moral duty."

-- Paul Krugman (yep, really)