Greater Opportunity Cost

What the protectionist is really saying, though he is usually too ignorant of economics to know what he’s really saying:
I want the government to use its coercive force to ensure that goods X, Y, and Z are available to domestic purchasers only at greater opportunity cost (i.e., greater sacrifice of valuable goods and services) than would have to be born if those goods were purchased from foreign sellers offering better terms of sale.
Save as PDFPrint

Written by 

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.