Morals of Economic InternationalismHobson, J. A. (John Atkinson)
Philosophy
Morals of Economic Internationalism
Hobson, J. A. (John Atkinson)
International cooperation; Reconstruction (1914-1939)
The second flaw is the assumption of a limited amount of market, which
carries with it the assumption that the groups of traders, gathered
under their national flags, are engaged in a conflict in which they are
entitled to embroil their governments. By tariff bargaining and by all
sorts of diplomatic weapons each government is called upon to assist
its nationals and to cripple or exclude the nationals of other states.
Now it is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the
consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the
expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible,
and is always expanding; and commercial experience shows that the rapid
expansion of the overseas trade of one country does not preclude the
expansion of trade of other countries. I do not, of course, deny that
at a particular time and in relation to some particular lucrative
opportunity, genuine clashes of interests may arise. But, envisaging
the whole range of foreign commerce, one feels that the image of it as
a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at
the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a
most fertile source of international misunderstanding.
Perhaps the worst of the three fallacies, and in a sense the
deepest-rooted, is the concept of export trade as of more value than
import trade. This is often traced back to the time when governments
deemed it desirable to accumulate in their countries treasures of gold
and silver and to this end encouraged the sale of goods abroad and
discouraged the payment for them in foreign goods. There are, however,
modern supporters of the assumption that it is more important to sell
than to buy, although the money received for sales has no other
significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be
imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes
of selling and of buying are complementary.
The economic explanation of the double falsehood of dividing buying
from selling and of imputing a higher value to the latter process, lies
beyond the scope of this address. But the injuries resulting from the
superior pressure upon governments of organized bodies of producers and
merchants who have things to sell, to the detriment of the consuming
public who have only buying needs, are too grave matters to be
neglected here. It is not too much to say that, if the interests of
consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of
governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a
peaceful, harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the
suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by
the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private
interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other
single circumstance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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