The idiocy of politicians’ interference with international trade knows no bounds. The Japanese negotiators want to maintain a tariff on cheese imports from the UK. There is no tradition of eating dairy produce in Japan and no significant cheese industry, so what are the negotiators trying to protect? The main victims will be expat Brits who fancy a taste of the home country, and a few local people with odd tastes. But the British negotiators should make it clear they they are acting like idiots but if they insist, they can get on with their stupidity. This spat also demonstrates the pointlessness of so-called free trade agreements. Countries should just remove their own barriers to imports. If the removal is not reciprocated, it’s the other countries’ funeral.
I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
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