So You Want To Be Kept As a Pet?

[This will not be one of my more thoughtful posts.]

When people ask to be protected from competition from foreigners, I imagine they are really saying to the rest of society, "Keep me as a pet." The request for protection comes in two forms: import restrictions (protecting them from people toiling in their home country and shipping us the goods), and immigration restrictions (protecting them from people literally crossing the border and "taking" their job). It's like saying, "I can't compete, and I'm unwilling to take the pay cut necessary to keep doin' what I'm doin'. Please protect me from people who can do the same thing I can do only better and cheaper." It's basically asking the rest of society to subsidize the lifestyle you've grown comfortable with so you don't have to adjust to a changing world.

It's like asking the rest of society to "adopt" your factory or office building, pump money into it (even though it's become economically irrelevant or wasteful), and turn it into one of those historic villages where actors wander around trying not to break character while interacting with the tourists. Of course this isn't literally what happens. The propped-up office or factory surely produces some economically meaningful output, which props up the illusion that it's a viable company. But the unfettered economics suggest that the firm should close, and the workers and capital employed by that firm should go into other productive ventures. Propping up these dying businesses halts progress. The churn is sometimes painful, but people do adjust when the inevitable change finally comes. Like Deirdre McCloskey says, economic change is win-win-win-win-win-win-win-lose. The wins outweigh the losses, but eventually you do experience that loss and you adjust, perhaps entering an industry that didn't exist five years ago. To halt the losses is to throw out all those wins, all because a sympathetic-looking interest group asked to be coddled. In the reductio ad absurdum, we're all still toiling farmers plus maybe the rare skilled tradesman. Thank goodness we didn't get stuck there.