On Free Trade Ideology
According to conventional “wisdom” free trade leads to prosperity. Usually the idea is based on a version of David Ricardo’s (1817) theory of “comparative advantage” which is taught in most high-school economics classes. There is, however, a fundamental problem with that theory, as was shown by Frank Graham in 1923, and unfortunately that problem tends to be ignored. In the following, I will briefly summarize Ricardo’s theory and Graham’s correction thereof, and discuss why the latter is ignored and the effects and implications of that neglect. Ricardo’s model Assume a world with two countries, “country A” and “country B”, and...
What’s there to be proud of?
Pride plays an important role in most – if not all – ideologies on the right of the political spectrum. National pride and racial pride are the most obvious examples. The former is, of course, the core feature of nationalism or patriotism; the latter is the foundation of racism. The dominant kind of pride in contemporary right-wing thought seems to be civilizational pride, however. That is, one of the key aspects of the alt-right and right-wing populism as well as more mainstream contemporary conservatism is pride in Western civilization. This pride in Western civilization, let’s call it “Western pride”, is...