this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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You would not expect an efficient world market to have a zero bilateral trade balance between each pair of countries in it.
Say we have a world with three countries.
Country A is good at producing apples and consumes a lot of beans.
Country B is good at producing beans and consumes a lot of cherries.
Country C is good at producing cherries and consumes a lot of apples.
No country on there should have a zero bilateral trade balance with any other country. Country A should run a deficit with B and surplus with C. B should run a deficit with C and surplus with A. C should run a deficit with A and surplus with B.
You could, with sufficient regulation, prevent that from happening, but you'd be giving up the gains you get from comparative advantage.
It is actually even more stupid. If Country A invests into Country B, then Country A has a trade surplus with Country B. However it also owns the investments, which means profits from the investment in Country B should be send back to Country A.
That is exactly what happened with the US. They invest a lot abroad after WW2 and are now living of the capital they own abroad.
And even if someone makes a fortune abroad, they'll still generally invest their profits in Wall Street.
And even if they don't, their country will buy US dollars to keep in their reserves and buy oil.
I mean A could sell apples and buy cherries from C and then sell the cherries to B and buy their beans. That would make a zero sum with both countries. Sure it results in the same end result but with more shiping cost. I think the problem is that many people don't understand, that a deficit in trade is nothing negative, you are not losing money as a country because you are still getting products.
Nobody complains, that we (as people) have a trade deficit with supermarkets, why don't they employ us at least for the money we pay in groceries!?
Trump is the only person I've ever heard complain about the trade deficit. I don't think even the crazy libertarians ever talked about it. It's just such a weird obsession of his.
"Even the crazy libertarians" should be the group least concerned with mercantilist tomfoolery.
It's just that the crazier and the more consistent a libertarian is, the less they are interested in mainstream politics and related personalities. It's a hermit ideology in some sense, a full P2P society.
About trade deficit - in general you all are correct, but in specifics it's bad when a country doesn't produce something important or a whole family of something important and imports that something important from potentially hostile nations. That's why before Brezhnev USSR's elite would try very hard to have basic production of every kind of necessary goods inside USSR.
I'm just not sure what they are trying to prepare for and how do they expect to fix the core reasons for production of various things having moved out of the USA>
Yeah, true about the libertarians, they wouldn't be the group that would be talking about that.