Fight Fire With Fire

Fight Fire with Fire The view is commonly held that in a world of wide spread economic nationalism, where nations have raised tariff walls against other nations, our only hope of sur vival is to do likewise. We must meet tariffs with tariffs -fight fire with fire. Such, of course, is not the case. Even if every single nation in the world raised tariffs against our products, we would gain in at leaSt two ways by leaving our own borders open for the importation of 39 goods. First, as consumers, we would benefit by the im portation of goods and services· shipped in at costs be low those for which we could produce them. Second and perhaps more important-this gesture would do more to establish friendly relations between nations than any other single thing we might do. Other nations would soon observe the wisdom of such a move and follow our example. State Monopolies In a similar vein, since many of the products we hn port are handled in the countries of origin by state monopolies, it is often argued that our government should serve as a monopoly in trade negotiations with those countries. This is specious reasoning at its worst. If a foreign government has control of all the tin production of its country and wants to sell this tin in the United States, is there any reason at all why it cannot deal directly with those Americans who want to buy tin? In this instance, the foreign government-if it will bargain in the market place-is just another individual so far as any buyer of tin is concerned. The amount of business involved in a trade-the "bigness" of the traders-does not alter the fact that each party seeks to get something of more value than that which he offers in exchange.