Rival Gang Violence Against Peaceful Traders

The indefatigable Cafe (Francis) Hayek engages here in a bit of amazing moral equivalence.

To treat foreign-governments’ trade restrictions as illegitimate is to assume that foreign governments do not carry out the will of their citizens. This assumption is surely valid. But given this fact, we cannot then, with any legitimacy, casually assume that the U.S.  government carries out the will of the American people.

The wise people who read this blog have spotted it immediately. For the others it’s a matter of China’s ignoring citizens’ wishes = U.S. doing the same to its citizens, as if China’s ruling class can be voted out of office.

Then Cafe H. insists on U.S. tariff imposition — a risky business, granted — as a simple question of tit-for-tat (which historically was probably never true of tariffs by whomever), ignoring the decades-long issue of patent infringement and intellectual property theft.

Thus:

I thus see no good reason to excuse Uncle Sam’s use of force to prevent us Americans from trading as we choose just because other governments use force to prevent non-Americans from trading as they choose.

Just because? Really?

via Cafe Hayek