Walls and Tariffs
Great Caesar dead and turned to clay, could stop a hole to keep the wind away......WS, Hamlet. UPDATE: The following is a repost of something I wrote a few years ago. I thinks it's appropriate to the question of the utility of tariffs, which form a sort of wall against the outside, which is why political entities have nearly always liked them, to the distress of economists who like Ricardo's arguments. The real purpose of such walls, whether stone walls of farms and castles or tariff barriers, is to facilitate internal integration and external competition - to fight entropy. SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall .........................Robert Frost, Mending Wall Physicists call it entropy. But there are also lots of things that do love walls, including neighbors, cells, cultures, nations and firms. Which is to say, all those things that like to live in a state of relatively low entropy. We build fences to keep order in and disorder out. Matthew Yglesias, ...