The question of the fairness of a company's prices now rests on where imaginary lines on a map happen to be drawn, on some deal cut by long-dead politicians or on how much territory some army conquered a few centuries before. Because Nova Scotia never joined the other British colonies in the 1776-1783 revolution, the Commerce Department judged a Canadian company guilty of dumping groundfish in its sales in Boston. Because Britain and the United States agreed in 1849 that the 49th parallel would be the boundary between the western United States and Canada, the Commerce Department condemned as unfairly priced raspberries from Saskatchewan sold in Seattle. If one company charges different prices in Vancouver, Washington, and Miami, Florida, that is fine. But if another company charges exactly the same different prices in Vancouver, Canada, and Miami, Florida, the U.S. Commerce Department rushes out to collect a few hundred thousand pages of documents to find out what went wrong.
Trade barriers come down to a question of political legitimacy.
Protectionism is nothing but politically controlled trade, which means political control of the life of the average citizen. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest. Our mission is to present an uncompromising moral, philosophical, and economic case for the libertarian philosophy. In the five years we have been publishing our essays, no one has ever found any compromise of libertarian principles. When it comes to advancing liberty, we always talk in terms of abolishing, ending, eliminating, and repealing.