Although workers outside the US are not protected by US civil rights laws, doesn’t “Buy America” legislation still make it legal to discriminate against workers in Mexico, China and Russia who make iron and steel by denying them equal access to employment opportunities for infrastructure projects spending taxpayer dollars? Should that worker discrimination based on national origin from “Buy America” legislation be acceptable if discrimination against those same workers would be illegal if they were on this side of an imaginary line called the US border?
It will be a great day when the ethics of “buy American” and “buy local” are viewed skeptically.
Ah, the great Libertarian talking point! Consider the civilization-barb axis though.
If I said “engage in acts of mercy and compassion in your local community first”, I doubt this would not raise eyebrows – why not prioritize the people in your everyday lives first? This is the essence of good civilization. So too with trade – why not “engage in mutually beneficial trade in your local community first”? The essence of civilation is sticking together.
Most Libertarian objections to trade restriction are really objections to the legitimacy of national borders
I’m not libertarian, but this raises a question about how far to apply the principle. Suppose I live in Arizona, across the border from Mexico. Is it really the case that Portland, Maine is more a part of my local community than Mexicali? And even aside from this, Portland is over a thousand miles away. Shouldn’t I at least privilege my fellow Arizonans when it comes to trade? If Americans should prioritize other Americans over, say, the Canadians or Japanese, then why should not Arizonans be able to prioritize themselves over Californians or Iowans?
For trade, as with charity, I think both/and applies rather than either/or. It’s good to trade and be charitable to those in your community, but it’s also generally good to trade with people from foreign nations, or invest in charities that will help people in distant nations (who may well be much poorer and at risk than your direct neighbors).
I’m not against all discrimination. For example, if Russia was producing steel with slave labor (and incidentally out-competing American steel on price), I think for that reason it would be legitimate to discourage or prevent trade with Russia in that particular commodity, and perhaps more generally. But not because it would be trading with Russians per se.
“Community” is a fluid concept that depends on context – it can be immediate family, local town, metropolitan region, state, or all humanity. It can even be things like race, religion, political beliefs, etc.
My concern is that the ethics of “buy local” are essentially the same ethics of “help my local community”. Do we really want to be skeptics of ethics that promote looking after each other? Is there really anything morally wrong about deliberately choosing to go to the local family-owned hardware store rather then Home Depot?
Yes, if choosing the local store wastes precious resources and results in lower wealth for both you and your neighbors overall. There is an easy way to tell, just look at the price, which is a great proxy for how much overall resources an item is going to cost. You can factor in other factors (like quality and service level), but if you’re buying similar items/service locally at higher prices than you could get them at a non-locally owned store, you are being wasteful and also perpetuating an efficiency distortion where maybe everyone would be better off if that local store owner used their considerable talents and resources in a way more beneficial to everyone in the long run.
“where maybe everyone would be better off”
The word “maybe” is the sticking point. Local shopkeepers are be any reasonable standard much better off with me as a customer. Now maybe Home Depot makes lots of it’s employees better off than before, and in aggregate this offsets badness of the shopkeeper being forced to close their store. I don’t know, but this involves the kinds of interpersonal comparisons of utility that Libertarians are fond of dismissing. Also, when the concentrated losses are local and the gains diffused, there is the opportunity for social dysfunction to snowball in the area of the losers, e.g. an opioid epidemic.
All in the name of anti-wastefulness!
Ben;
I’m entirely supportive of your way of thinking; and I believe that Arnold isn’t looking at all the complexity of his citizens, who frankly rely on diversity in their local area even if it isn’t always efficient, to meet their many idiosyncratic needs.
I do think that you have a problem with Justin’s objection; but that it can be met by proposing that people have several overlapping local communities (professional, family, neighborhood/geography) and that there are ‘stepwise’ progressions outwards with a roughly exponential fading of interaction and obligation. That means that you may have just about as much obligation to someone in Costa Rica as Australia, because they are both pretty far away. Given the connections of citizenship, etc, there is certainly some step at the border, perhaps significant. Certainly, there are steps at the close family and extended family; and the neighbors whose homes you can see, those you likely drive by every day; people in your office, people who share and employer; etc.
What I’d like to propose that may be more contentious is that as the distance increases, the distribution of the obligations also becomes aggregated to a degree; the obligations of foreign aid are not exactly each person in a country to help another country, but instead ‘countries’ helping ‘countries.’ Similarly, negotiations and war are at scale that way. So perhaps the local person doesn’t exactly owe something to a local company, but other local companies do? It’s a philosophical and practical statement that needs to be worked out in greater depth to be tested and evaluated.
Ultimately, Ben, the main difference between the libertarian position of buying from the cheapest seller vs. your favoritism of local sellers or small businesses is that the suffering in the latter case is more obscure, not lesser in magnitude.
If enough people buy local or patronize small businesses, in the process paying more, it doesn’t just cause a loss of employment for people working at big businesses, it also negatively affects other businesses at which you would have spent the money you’d save by buying the cheaper, ‘big business’ made good.
The thing is, you don’t see those negative effects, they’re not as tangible. Perhaps you take pride in the idea that one person whose name you know dying matters infinitely more to you than a hundred anonymous people dying, but many of us consider this a curious artifact of human psychology, not a virtue. In any case, if people buy food from more efficient big food businesses instead of small, local ones, more, better quality food gets produced using less resources (sparing them therefore for other purposes) thereby feeding more people, and causing less environmental damage. So, the question is, is localist sentimentalism really worth all those costs?
As for community preference, I’m personally a minimalist when it comes to borders as with nation-states in general. I may value my immediate community more because I know the people there, but people in Dearborn are strangers to me every bit as much people in Tokyo, so I see no reason to prefer buying cars from the former to buying them from the latter. Whatever your preferences are, I think the only thing most libertarians would demand of you is that you not impose your preferences on everyone else through trade restrictions.
Is it really so hard to understand that US laws are intended primarily to protect people who live in the US (including noncitizen immigrants)? Not all discrimination is invidious – unless you think nationhood and citizenship are meaningless or wicked concepts.
What’s interesting is that many contemporary libertarians are caught in a bind. Conservatives typically want both property and nationality to have rigid and meaningful definition. Progressives wants neither. Both of those positions are coherent. But libertarians will agree on the special importance of recognition of ‘imaginary’ legal concepts like property lines and corporate ownership and decision-making, fiduciary duties exclusive to shareholders and not the rest of the world, etc. but then try to deny the application of the same concepts to nations because The State is their devil.
Quite so.
That’s exactly what is being argued, and you can see that line of thought descending through a strain of the Christian religion.
There is something going on in the Old Testament about drawing the boundaries of a people and the relationship of the ‘chosen people’ to the rest of the world.
Then in the New, these are being violated left and right. It is actually rather confusing, because the obligations to the poor of the community, and the vulnerable stranger who shows up as a visitor in need, are conflated with also paying taxes to Rome (treason to the people, it was argued), accepting the Samaritans, loving the enemy. There are questions about the shared identity of the leaders of the people and the people themselves.
Out of this, some Christians would say that the Kingdom is established and the Church is its citizens. No longer are these people holding their identity as Jew, Roman, Greek, Slave, Free, Man, Woman, in old relationships, but they are brought into the Kingdom and given differentiated identities, yes, somewhat related to their old ones, yes, but primarily as adopted children of God, all together in unity.
Progressive Christians say something else. They say that the boundaries of that Kingdom as well are too restrictive, that it establishes falsely an identity that was either a mistake (from Jesus to Paul) or was not meant to last; that all boundaries are thrown open, that all humans will become an undifferentiated mass above the level of the individual; that they all (universalists) enter ‘heaven’ where the idea of having a king is silly and everything is about love.
Progressive Post-Christians say that much of that is a concession to the antiquity; there is no God, no spirit, no heaven; but that the vision of everyone being a single community of love (love your neighbor, love your enemy, love yourself) is the point – and that yes, nationhood and citizenship are wicked indeed!
Good point.
1. I would like to nominate this sense of “imaginary” for verbal retirement from serious political discourse. Everyone understands what is being attempted by use of this word, which stretches the limits of meaning beyond sense. Legal designations like geographic jurisdiction and related social conventions map too well to human objective reality for ‘imaginary’ to apply with validity. The existence of exclusive control over a piece of turf predates humanity.
2. Burdensome US regulations and other state-imposed costs also discriminate against people based on a border, in this case, American entrepreneurs vs their foreign counterparts who don’t have to pay those costs to sell to the same consumers. That puts American businesses and workers at a competitive disadvantage. Libertarians say they are supporting open markets and tend to complain about foreign discrimination, but not domestic discrimination. That’s fairly Complacent.
I would like to nominate this sense of “imaginary” for verbal retirement from serious political discourse.
I agree. “Line on a map” is exactly as descriptive and supports exactly the same argument without having any loaded language.
Libertarians say they are supporting open markets and tend to complain about foreign discrimination, but not domestic discrimination.
Who are these libertarians who don’t complain about burdensome US regulations and other state-imposed costs?
Whenever I see these ‘discrimination’ type arguments from libertarians, they only mention the one kind of discrimination, not the other, which is revealing. When they complain about regulatory costs, they sometimes mention competitive disadvantage, but never use the term ‘discrimination’, and often avoid mentioning the foreign fairness aspect altogether, since it might be taken as argument for barriers.
Complaining about costs is different than complaining about discrimination, and has different implications for legal remedies.
For instance, American competitive disadvantages due to domestic taxes on some input could be remedied by a subsidy or a complex tariff regime or other trade regulation. I’ve seen arguments that these would be impossible because hopelessly complicated, but those people haven’t examined the existing customs regime, to which any addition would be a drop in a bucket.
Those aren’t ideal policy answers, but they would address the problem of the legal discrimination against Americans, and they likely have enough broad political support to have a chance of being passed.
But libertarians aren’t interested in those solutions, which is reason to be skeptical that appeals like this to the moral imperative of anti-discrimination logic are heartfelt (symmetric) instead of pretextual (asymmetric).
In today’s ideological environment, it’s easier to argue against national barriers than against domestic regulations, and the progressives have made it seem like anti-discrimination is an effective, general-purpose weapon used to argue for anything in ideological warfare. But doing so is dishonest and Complacent.
But libertarians aren’t interested in those solutions…
I still don’t know these libertarians who are not interested in reducing legislated and regulatory burdens and inequities. Maybe a citation is in order?
Some US companies face burdens. Some US companies receive subsidies. Libertarians almost universally want to eliminate or rationalize all of these. But don’t be shocked if they don’t want to correct one form of government interference in the market by adding a countervailing form of government interference.
No kidding. It’s not so imaginary when you’re trying to cross it!