The balanced trade part

I happen to be under the tutelage of one of the founders of the balanced trade movement. As such I feel that I should at least mention it once on this blog.

While my professor works out all of the intellectual kinks of the system, I wanted to address the more common sense part of the problem. Now there are generally considered to be two philosophies of international trade: free trade and protectionism. However, my professor points out that there are actually four. Free trade (U.S.), Protectionism (Argentina, I think), Mercantilism (China), and Balanced trade (which no country has yet been smart enough to adopt). Now, free trade is just if you leave everything alone, everything is just handy dandy. I think the law of entropy can speak for itself. Protectionism is a proven failure and in all reality is not even protectionism, it's political favoritism. Mercantilism purposely creates imbalances in trade, which do help the exporting country, but this system is absolutely doomed to failure in the long run.

Now balanced trade I think is most easily understood with an analogy to the microeconomic level. A household cannot continually but well above it's means, or eventually the creditors will come around. If income signfinies exports and expenditures imports, these two must eventually equal out. While a suplus of income would not be necessarily bad, it's sort of pointless if there are expenditures to match in some way (say putting in savings account, investmnet, rennovations, what have you). similarly a country cannot continually receive from the world more than it gives out. Now I realize that Warren Buffet's importation certificates plan seems like a weird thing for a Distributist, but personally I believe that if there in one instance of govenrment intervention which can help right now, it is importation certificates, not stimulus packages or whatever else the Bush/Obama people can dream up. Furthermore, the government has regulartory power over the economy, and this would be regulation, and the government also wouldn't be able to decide what is imported or not (like tariffs do). All it does is ensure that we have an exchange with the world, and that we're aren't getting stuffed like some spoiled child until we burst.

And of course, Shakespeare put the whole point into 1 line of blank verse
"Neither a lender nor a borrower be"