Chris Dillow asks, (Why) does free trade favour the rich?
Here is something on Make Trade Fair’s website that absolutely infuriates me:
Pitting fledgling industries in poor countries against big business overseas is like putting a rabbit in a cage with a tiger.
It is such a stupid analogy. They seem to have completely missed the fact that animals tend not to trade with each other, and that countries tend not to eat each other.
There’s a new advert for innocent smoothies on TV. Its as po-faced as their previous efforts, featuring a montage of images with captions over them.
Anyway, at one point it shows a collection of african blokes staring into the camera, with the caption “we don’t crush these”. Who sells cannibal smoothies?
The analogy is bang on the money – countries may not eat each other, but companies in the same market do. There is no country in the world which has come to economic strength without protectionist policies – for good reason. Now other countries are preached to remove such protections – also with reason, although none that are good for them.