Unilateral Free Trade - Patrick Barron - Mises Daily

Unilateral Free Trade - Patrick Barron - Mises Daily: "the European Union harms its own citizens, for they must pay more for oil, buy inferior oil, or suffer some kind of inconvenience. Otherwise, why would they have purchased Iranian oil in the first place? One could even go so far as to say that the EU wages war against its own citizens and not against Iran, for, undoubtedly, there are police sanctions that the EU would employ against its members for violating the Iranian trade prohibition that must rest on the threat of violence."

"The United States has complained for some time that China intervenes in its own currency markets to hold down the value of the yuan in order to increase export sales."

"America enjoys an outright subsidy from China. China sells the United States goods below cost and causes its own citizens to suffer higher prices; that is, higher Chinese domestic prices are caused by its currency intervention that gives American importers more yuan than the free-market rate"

"The only international economic policy that a country needs is to mind its own business and set a good example to the rest of the world. A just economic policy for a free and prosperous nation would be based on the twin pillars of unilateral free trade and nonintervention into its own markets."

"If the currency never finds its way back to the nation that adopted unilateral free trade and is held indefinitely in the coffers of some foreign bank or central bank, that nation has simply been on the receiving end of a gift. An analogy would be that of a friend or neighbor who sells you something and then never cashes your check."