 The Mises Institute has a new free book for minor issues fans, Dr. Guido Hulsman's How Inflation Destroys Civilization. Learn how inflation isn't only making us poor, it's harming our culture, meant to well-being, and the moral foundations of civilization itself. Get your free copy today at Mises.org slash Issues Free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute, and I'm currently writing a paper in preparation for the Austrian Economics Research Conference. The topic is free trade. The most important conceptual contribution to this critical issue is by Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist. You might say that the topic is currently on the back burner. Aren't central banks, immigration, economic stagnation, and even war more important topics? Well, all of those issues are related to trade and protectionism. And what about other issues? Well, President Trump put a terrifying steel imports, which Biden opposed as a candidate, and then supported. This hurts American manufacturers and jobs. A Japanese steel producer recently tried to buy U.S. Steel. The U.S. subsidizes electric vehicles, but domestic producers now face more efficient foreign producers and are losing in the international competition. The Biden administration opposes all mergers and acquisitions. This threatens to undermine the competitiveness of many industries and businesses in the U.S. The European Union imposes huge fines on corporate giants elsewhere, but the result is higher prices and less selection for European consumers. Meanwhile, now the U.S. is the world's leading energy producer and has the fastest expanding output. But it's also now at war with Russia and in the Middle East. It's two biggest competitors on world markets. Once you understand how Mises conceives a free trade, you realize that free trade is always the most important issue. Trade is related to everything else in both a general way and in very specific ways. Plus, it is clearly a scientific issue where everybody benefits from trade, at least in terms of international trade. All economists worth their salt agree. It's an issue everyone can understand, like trading baseball cards or shifts at work or jewelry between girlfriends that is all mutually beneficial. Therefore, it is the perfect galvanizing issue. Protectionism, on the other hand, is the opposite. One group gets protected by the government and benefits. Everybody else loses. The beneficiaries love this type of system and will do anything to keep it. What Mises did was to scientifically demonstrate the logic of trade and that it was much more important than usually thought. He showed that society, or civilization in general, and the fact that we usually don't act like animals and that we have an incredibly advanced standard of living, was all the result of trade. The human ability to reason and conceptualize is what separates us from the animals, and this ability is needed for trading. And also trading strengthens those abilities while firing the imagination. For Mises, humanity has been transformed over a few dozen millennia from small isolated primitive animal-like hunter-gatherer groups to a highly advanced integrated society with stable food supplies, abundant clothing and tools, and sophisticated housing and transportation. The key word here is integrated, integration. Human society is integrated. We are now almost completely integrated by market activity. You no doubt have products that were produced at least in part in Asia or Europe or North America. Your favorite beverage might be produced in South America, Africa or the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Your clothing from raw materials to finished products might come from dozens of different countries. Most people also supply goods or services around the world. Even this podcast would count. Most people supply a similar good or service that is provided by someone around the world, whether that's a food item, automobile repair services or babysitting services. The world has a lot of similarities. The whole human population is integrated by the market through trade of various sorts, and we often don't think or don't even have to think about it. We certainly are not integrated politically or religiously or through any other system that isn't in its most basic form a trading system, for example, the Internet. Mises also identified that government interference inside the economy increases the likelihood of government interference at the border, like with tariffs or taxes on imported goods. For example, if Albania gives a monopoly to local doctors, then the prices doctors charge patients increases. High doctor fees in Albania might encourage Albanians to drive across the border or use teledoc services from doctors in cheaper countries. Albanian doctors might respond by asking the government to protect patients from cheap foreign doctors. You get the drift. Government interference at the border has its own set of predictable effects. Tariffs on steel imports to help Albanian steel producers might be circumvented by using foreign steel to produce cars in other countries, kitchen appliances, or using it as input into heavy construction. Even the tariff on imported steel, Albanian producers of those products are already at a disadvantage because they are paying a higher price for domestic steel. How are they supposed to respond? And who speaks for the consumer who is paying higher prices for everything? You can easily see how trade wars start, and it's not a stretch of the imagination to see that it can also result in a real fighting war with horrific consequences. World War II is the obvious case where colonial powers were in a struggle for resources such as land and oil, but also the hundreds of years of warfare between England and France was primarily a trade and protectionist conflict. When you read Mises, you quickly realize how important free trade is, but also how vulnerable we are to protectionism, whether large and obvious forms of protectionism at the border or the small and innocuous violations caused by government protectionism of various sorts that can spiral out of control.