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But that's the whole thing, we used to. The only reason we don't anymore is simply they do it better than us.
Like I said, read up on protectionism. Here is the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism
People do still buy local goods, except you have to pay a premium. McDonalds beef is locally sourced, etc.
But it should be up to the consumer and not the government on where they want their products to come from.
As for price, well price and quality are directly related in a closed market. So you pay more for a better product. If we open the market to include other countries, we can get luxury foods that would be very expensive for a fairer price, and also staple goods we can get cheaply.
There are already taxes on transport, and duty to pay on importing, so a lot of the environmental cost is accounted for (whether the money is invested back into the environment by the government is another question).
I mean, lets scale it down. Farmer Brown opposite me sells a whole chicken for £10. Farmer Grey at the other side of town sells a whole chicken for £5. Should I have to buy the more expensive one because it is more local? When it may not be any better quality at all, could even be inferior.
Yep
That, and the fact that his biological father is the subject of some debate, and Hitler himself certainly didn't know.
If anything, it's contentious because of the idea that anyone who is "highly intelligent" would be bribed into having kids by a few quid. Surely such money would be much better spent in offering opportunities to gifted children, rather than some bizarre incentive-based eugenics scheme that would take generations to have even the smallest effect? Eugenics is inherantly problematic, because it involves picking certain human attributes as superior to others. What happens when two rich athletes complain because they both excel in a particular field, and yet they have no financial bonus for bringing a talented child (well, the assumption of a talented child) into the world? Perhaps more importantly though, is the fact that genetic diversity is far more important than any other single human genetic trait.
Well if the government were spending taxes on imported products on the environment there wouldn't really be a problem, but does anybody trust the government to do anything?
To suddenly stop or seriously limit trade with other countries would clearly be insane, but we now a have a global economy, at least more than we did when limits on imports were last used. Of course it had disasterous consequences then, imports were relatively rare in comparisson to the amount we have now, and relations between countries were much more fragile. I don't think France would suffer much if we bought apples prouduced in Britain and I'm certain world war 3 won't happen because of it.
By the way, I don't think chicken is the best example. The only way one chicken could be better quality than another is if one's free range and the other isn't, in which case the cheaper one would not be better quality. Anyway, fresh food is generally prefered, which people are more likely to get from local sources.
It should be up to the consumer rather than the government to decide where they want the food to come from, but then it should be up to people with cars and not the government to find a solution to the amount of traffic, and it should be up to binge drinkers and not the government to pay for any hospital treatment they need as a result of falling down some stairs or something.
Well they certainly took great delight in banning british beef as soon as possible and refused to lift an import ban on it long after other countries had and the EU had declared the ban illegal.
Also depend slightly on the breed to a certain extent but it'd matter much more in meats such as beef and pork. Also what the animal is fed, how "free range" it is, etc. etc.
So it's up to the consumer, and yet you want the government to ban imports where such items are available here? Those two aims don't quite match up.
But not manufactured goods.
I suspect that Scottish products have a slightly bigger carbon footprint on the way down to London than French ones have on the way up. I don't see an environmental issue with buying European produce tbh, even if technically it'd be slightly better to buy British products. There's another dilemma though. Buy wine from France and you help save the environment, buy ethically-produced wine from Chile and help people in poverty. But I think from an environmental perspective, the issue isn't buying things like Pineapples and Bananas, it's buying things that are grown in Europe cheaper from abroad. No-one needs to buy asparagus from Peru or beef from Uruguay, for example. With bananas, you don't have a choice (other than not buying them, obviously). But even British products don't guarantee a low carbon footprint anyway. Scampi, for example, usually has the breadcrumbs put on in Asia and then is shipped back.
I suppose it depends whether people want the price of food to quadruple or not...
It all depends on the process though as well. What if one farmer has more expensive rent? What if one farmer wastes more money, driving the average cost of his chicken up? What if he pays his staff too high wages? What if his staff aren't as good, so they don't produce as much? And so on...
The free market is completely designed to eradicate waste and pursue the most efficient supply and demand path pretty much. In a free market, you would buy from the people who are most effective at producing goods whether for quality or quantity or a mix, you wouldn't buy from the guy who really doesn't have a clue about raising chickens so half of them die, meaning he has to sell the other half for double.
In a protected market you have to buy from clueless idiots who would far better serve the global economy by doing something they are good at. They could plant apples instead, much better than Farmer Grey, so you can buy cheap high quality apples from Farmer Brown and cheap high quality chicken from Farmer Grey.
There are fixed costs in any local economy of the land, the labour and the capital (machinery etc.). If something is very labour intensive, why produce it in the UK if labour is extremely expensive. Really, if you were being efficient you only want to do highly skilled work in the UK because the labour is relatively skilled / intelligent. Same with raw materials, you don't see massive mines digging up iron ore in the UK because we don't have massive deposits, not compared to South America. Because it's much cheaper over there, taking it out of the ground there and shipping it here makes sense. It means we get the raw material cheaper than digging it up ourself, and then can machine it or use it in construction after that. End result, the cost of the end good is less.
The other issue, which is a political one, is if you restrict imports from France, then France will restrict imports from the UK. The whole notion of the EU first and foremost was to stop all the damaging protectionism. Everyone wants to secure jobs for their workers (France especially), so they say, "no, we won't import British beef, we'll make it ourselves!". This causes diseconomies of scale which are interesting to look into, basically as things get smaller then average cost goes up. Also the fact that the most efficient producer isn't being rewarded because even if our beef is 10x better than France's, the French will only buy French beef.
It took some clever people a lot of balls to admit the only way to succeed together would be to open up trade. This is no different from Essex accepting trade from Suffolk, or England accepting trade from Wales, just on a larger scale.
The government does invest some of the tax revenues from import duties and fuel tax into environmental schemes but how much is enough? That's a big topic at the moment because the environmental debate is relatively new-ish (i.e. the last quarter century when it was being taken seriously).
Myself as a devout free-trade advocate I think even fair trade is a bad idea, if you want to read into why look at the article unfair trade by the Adam Smith Institute.
Buying things from Europe is not as bad as buying things from other countries in terms of the environmental impact, so for things like grapes I'll try to buy them from france or someone where that's not far away, rather than places like chilie where supermarkets seem to get them from. The point I was trying to make is that there will be much less waste if people try to buy things from the nearest source to them, which doesn't mean buying a neighbour's horrible strawberries because that would have no carbon footprint. Consumerism can exist in a more ethical way if people made ethics more of a priority. Things like sugar and pinapples have to be imported, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be. I've never said we should ban imports, I don't think anyone would say that.
I think the idea that free trade reduces waste and is better for the economy is insane. The government didn't introduce regulations in the early 1900's for the fun of it, or to look busy. The lack of regulation resulted in extremely high levels of poverty, child mortality, disease and illiteracy which no one could say is good for the economy. Things like fair trade and minimum wage are essential because, apart from the fact that it increases spending and the number of businesses, it leaders to a higher standard of living for more people. If an "efficient" economy requires 98% of the world's population to live in poverty then I'm against it. What would be the point in being able to import things you can't afford anyway?
Did you know fair trade only benefits farmers that receive the fair trade subsidies. These are typically land owners so not the poorest of the poor either. Also, typically not even in the poorest counties, i.e. mexico. This is bad because poorer farmers in Ethiopia will find it even harder to compete to make a living but there we are.
Fairtrade is an exercise in marketing brought about because there wasn't a good supply of coffee. That was because of government regulation in the first place. 90% of the fair trade premium you pay goes to the shop and the middleman, only 10% actually goes back to the supplier.
An efficient economy isn't about 98% of the people being poor
Which regulations were introduced in the early 1900s, btw? Not sure what to google for.
But do read up on economic protectionism and also read unfair trade by the adam smith institute.
without a doubt mein kampf is definately the work of a highly intelligent self taught person.