Nevertheless, the popularity of an idea is no guarantee of its veracity, especially in economic matters. That being the case, a fresh examination of the economic premises that are often taken for granted, is justified. In this essay I intend to put to the test the common assertion that exports are unambiguously good and imports bad. That international trade is in every country's interests is not something I aim to prove in this essay, and I take it as a given. I will only reiterate that any voluntary exchange must be mutually beneficial, otherwise it would not be voluntarily undertaken.
Contemporary wisdom suggests that exports represent our gains from trade.
We are told exports are good, and that the more we export the better off we are. One ostensible reason might be that we are able to employ more people, the more we export. Creating more jobs is indisputably a good thing. Taking up a suggestion by Milton Friedman, if all we want is more jobs, we could put half the unemployed to work by paying them to dig holes, and the other half to work - by paying them to fill them in. Of course we all know that we haven't actually solved anything.