Friday, March 04, 2011

Video: How Wealth Is Derived From Mutually Beneficial Free Trade

Trade is human action: we do this everyday with the aim at attaining better life and live past self sufficiency which characterized the lives of our primitive ancestors.

Trade today is mostly voluntary, it is done by individuals at the community level or provincial or regional or at the national level. The difference in the trading environment depends on the degree of trade freedom, which are mostly shaped by the governing political policies.


Because trade appears as a mundane activity, its manifold benefits seem as hardly sentiently appreciated by the public. In short, the benefits of trade are frequently underappreciated.


And when trade is framed as an aggregate, i.e. substituted with statistics and accounting figures, trade becomes subject to waffling political talking points, and importantly, loses its human touch. Trade, then, becomes subject to acrimonious disputes, many of which results to perverse laws that curtails trade--and prosperity.


The following video, from LearnLiberty.org, presents Professor Art Carden who discusses the basics of free trade from the perspective of the LAW OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE (also known as the law of comparative costs) and how free trade leads to prosperity.


Comparative advantage deals with achieving efficiency out of relative opportunity costs or according to wikipedia,

In economics, the law of comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party (an individual, a firm, or a country) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party. It is the ability to produce a product with the highest relative efficiency given all the other products that could be produced.


No comments: