It is fashionable in these trying times to worry a lot about protectionism.  Economists issue dire warnings that hard times must not lead us to clamp down on “free trade”, because inhibiting the free flow of goods will lead to local scarcity and higher prices for everyone, thus exacerbating the current economic malaise.  But I wonder if these ideas have been thoroughly thought through in the light of the new economic order that we are trying to build.

To my mind, well managed protectionism is starting to make a lot of sense.  One of the biggest ecological problems that we face is the endless flow of goods around the world.  Current economic models call for raising lettuce in Chile or somewhere, then shipping it clear to California and undercutting the local farmers with cheap produce.  But this model costs a huge amount in resources (see Economic Sense, my previous post), which for arcane economic reasons are severely underpriced in terms of the damage that they do to the planet.  The costs of all this...

When I was a young man, life was a bit simpler.  There was a thing called Common Sense.  People thought that things either made sense or they didn’t make sense, and easily described them in that way.  Nowadays it’s a bit more complicated, and one of the most interesting additions to that vocabulary is “economic sense”.  Recent events have caused me to reflect a lot on the notion of economic sense, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is essentially an oxymoron. 

People usually say that something makes “economic sense” when they mean that it doesn’t make sense any other way, and is in fact irrational and ridiculous, but because of our arcane and bizarre set of economic rules, somebody can make a ton of money doing it anyway.  Take, for example, off-shoring.  It makes “economic sense” to make a computer chip in Los Angeles, ship it across the Pacific Ocean to China, have somebody stick the chip into a board, and then ship that board back across the Pacific to be sold again in Los Angeles. 

But...

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