BACK TO SCHOOL.

Donald "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers a warm-up challenge to economics students.

[T]he naive protectionist (of which there are many today) will reply with what he or she supposes is a “Gotcha!” This protectionist will note the obvious fact that food is necessary for life. From this fact the protectionist will proceed to argue that if the nation isn’t producing enough food to feed its own people, the people of the nation are dependent upon foreigners for their very lives. This situation (the protectionist continues by asking about the event of war) is intolerable. “We must restrict food imports so that we once again build, here at home, the capacity to feed ourselves. We simply cannot be dependent on foreigners for something as vital as food.”

To economically uninformed people, this protectionist sounds reasonable, and perhaps even unanswerable. But economics alerts us to several problems with this protectionist way of thinking.

So here’s the contest. Using no more than 500 words, identify one of these several problems with this protectionist’s argument, and email your answer to me.

There might be more than one problem with the objection as he poses it, and his rules allow for keen students to identify more than one problem, but each problem merits a separate entry.  He will publish the best responses in some future post.