Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages 229-230 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:

We gain from what we get, not from what we give up. We gain from imports embodying foreign resources; exports are a cost, a drain, for our economy, with American production utilized by the rest of the world.

DBx: Indeed so. And so, therefore, that great geyser of cronyism, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, by subsidizing foreigners’ purchases of American exports, uses American taxpayers’ money to fund a net drain of resources from the American economy. The fact that such an agency as the Ex-Im Bank not only survives, but is widely (although not universally!) regarded as beneficial, testifies to the toxic mixture of grotesque cronyism with the general-public’s appalling economic ignorance.