by Jurgen Brauer, March 2004
Copyright: J. Brauer. No reproduction without permission.

I know how doctors must feel when their patients don't follow prescribed treatment. The patients come back again and again to be "treated" - expensively - for the same symptoms. While this sustains the doctor's livelihood, surely it is also frustrating that patients don't listen and make basic lifestyle changes for the better: drink in moderation, stop smoking, eat less and more sensibly, exercise, sleep well, drive more slowly, laugh with your friends, and read a poem a day. This alone would shave pounds off your pouch and billions off the nation's medical bill.

I am a doctor of a different kind - an economist - and it is frustrating to have to tell my patients - that's all of you - the same thing over and over again. Here it is: All trade is mutual beneficial.

I am a doctor of a different kind - an economist - and it is frustrating to have to tell my patients - that's all of you - the same thing over and over again. Here it is: All trade is mutual beneficial. The only truly patriot act is to trade more, not less. To restrict free, private, voluntary trade is un-American.

The United States is recovering from an economic recession. Instead of unemployment hovering around four percent of the labor force, as it did during all of the year 2000, it went to a high of 6.3 percent by June 2003 and, as of January 2004, dropped to 5.6 percent. Meanwhile, stories emerged about "outsourcing" of call-center jobs. The story goes that something frighteningly "new" has happened: not only are we losing blue-collar manufacturing jobs to Mexico and Malaysia but now we are losing white-collar service jobs to Ireland and India. Somehow Scrooge's ruthless, fat-cat businessmen, in their eternal search for profits, mercilessly throw fellow compatriots onto the street, invest overseas and hire workers at a pittance there. How mean-spirited! How downright unpatriotic! Let's have legislation that bans or otherwise restricts "outsourcing."

Never mind that the unemployed would make bad customers, and hence bad business, let's push a bit harder and make a real job of this route to economic bliss. The other day, I hired a Jacuzzi repairman who works out of Aiken, SC. As an Georgian, surely you must be upset: how un-Georgian of me to hire someone from South Carolina. Mea culpa. I should have hired someone from, say, Columbia county which would have kept the money and the job in Georgia. But there's a problem. If I hire the Columbian, then all of Richmond county will bang on my door for my un-Richmondian behavior!

Every time you spend a dollar on anybody, you are outsourcing a job.

The point is that every time you spend a dollar on anybody, you are outsourcing a job. It does not matter where that somebody lives. If you are an anti-free trader, have the decency and be consistent: don't trade with anybody at all. Of course you should then expect that if you don't spend a dollar on anybody, nobody will spend a dollar on you either!

Back to the big picture back. Suppose the United States bans "outsourcing." No more U.S. investment and job creation abroad. What do you think other countries might do in return? If they also ban outsourcing, that means they will stop investing and creating jobs here. In case you haven't noticed, even a backwater city such as Augusta (backwater relative to the hot spots of the nation) is brimming with jobs created by foreign investors. If we "call back" jobs we shifted abroad, and foreigners "call back" jobs they created here, we'd be instantly impoverished!

Can't we just trade jobs back? We take the jobs foreigners created here, and let foreigners have the jobs we created there? If that were such a brilliant idea, why then do people from one country create jobs in another country in the first place? When foreigners invest and create jobs here, they do so because we can do the job better than they can. And when we create jobs abroad, we do so because foreigners can do it better than we can. Indeed, that is why we trade. My doctor is better at medicine than I am, and I am better at economics than he is. And if the radiologist who reads my x-ray happens to reside an India, so be it. It saves me money that I then can spend on something else - like that Jacuzzi repairman in Aiken.

Mutual trade - and it does not matter with whom, here or abroad - is mutually beneficial because it is voluntarily agreed to between buyer and seller. Both sides gain or else they would not voluntarily engage in free trade. And that is precisely why, at the expense of the country as a whole, restricted trade benefits no one but special interests, such as politicians making hay out of your economic illiteracy. (And this goes for both sides of the congressional aisle; after all, Mr. Bush does not have a stellar free-trade record.)

Do the nation a favor: listen to your doctor!