• dont_lemmee_down@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

    I mean A could sell apples and buy cherries from C and then sell the cherries to B and buy their beans. That would make a zero sum with both countries. Sure it results in the same end result but with more shiping cost. I think the problem is that many people don’t understand, that a deficit in trade is nothing negative, you are not losing money as a country because you are still getting products.

    Nobody complains, that we (as people) have a trade deficit with supermarkets, why don’t they employ us at least for the money we pay in groceries!?

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      5 hours ago

      Trump is the only person I’ve ever heard complain about the trade deficit. I don’t think even the crazy libertarians ever talked about it. It’s just such a weird obsession of his.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        “Even the crazy libertarians” should be the group least concerned with mercantilist tomfoolery.

        It’s just that the crazier and the more consistent a libertarian is, the less they are interested in mainstream politics and related personalities. It’s a hermit ideology in some sense, a full P2P society.

        About trade deficit - in general you all are correct, but in specifics it’s bad when a country doesn’t produce something important or a whole family of something important and imports that something important from potentially hostile nations. That’s why before Brezhnev USSR’s elite would try very hard to have basic production of every kind of necessary goods inside USSR.

        I’m just not sure what they are trying to prepare for and how do they expect to fix the core reasons for production of various things having moved out of the USA>

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          4 hours ago

          Yeah, true about the libertarians, they wouldn’t be the group that would be talking about that.