I was reminded recently of an old post at the Mises blog, in which Art Carden criticizes the idea of buying locally.

Buy local is, at its logical limit, a prescription for poverty and starvation… [It] may be good for some local farmers and it may soothe the conscience of the social progressive, but the longer-run, hidden consequences will be undesirable and injurious.

Carden objects to the “buy local” philosophy as economically wasteful, and given incomplete and short-sighted analysis, this certainly appears to be the case. Following Hazlitt’s suggestion that, when evaluating an economic prescription, it’s imperative to trace “the effect of any policy to all groups rather than its effect on specialized interests,” Carden’s argument makes a strong appeal to our sense of economics, but ultimately does not go far enough in heeding this sage advice.

Properly understood (which is not to say that a great deal of “buy local” proponents don’t understand things properly!), the argument is not a call to Autarky. To be fair, I believe that there are tremendous benefits to both trade and the division of labor. What I contest, however, is the assumption which Carden (knowingly or not) smuggled into the argument: the current division of labor is a close enough approximation of universally preferable methods, policies, and behaviors — as such its own structure warrants no further consideration.

Fréderic Bastiat would ask that we examine ce qui l’on ne voit pas, that which is not seen.

To the extent that government subsidizes huge agribusinesses (cf. Archer Daniels Midland, the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare prior to teh $7.4 Trillion bailout of 2008-09), shields companies with limited liability laws (OK, this is a subject of debate among libertarians), manipulates the market for capital and credit through inflationary monetary policy, etc., we’re certainly not talking about anything even approaching a free market. In light of these (and myriad other examples of distortion and misallocation), at the very least, Carden’s argument which assumes that any deviation from the current division of labor would be economically wasteful, does not pass the smell test.

In the West, a lot of people favor the allegedly “free market”, primarily because it “works” for us. That’s what we see. What we don’t see is exactly how widespread some of these manipulations reach. But it’s responsible for keeping a substantial majority of the world’s nations impoverished, her people indebted. Even at home, the problems are only hidden from view, if we refuse to look.

• Generations of government interference, regulation, “deregulation”, reregulation, etc., have incentivized urban sprawl to the detriment of sustainable communities (after all, who needs to care genuinely about his community, if he’s able to move to a slightly further suburb or ex-burb as soon as his neighborhood starts to take a turn for the worse?).
• Decades of landmark financial regulations, each one of which was designed to prevent another calamity, and each one of which was ultimately an epic fail in its own right!
• Subsidies for auto companies that spent the better part of a century fleecing the public with planned obsolescence and strongarm tactics to keep better, cheaper, and more fuel-efficient foreign cars off the market.
• Your tax dollars (or your children’s tax dollars) siphoned back in to the very same banking industry that might well have begun the end of the world as we know it.

Ce qui l’on ne voit pas.

Sure, a lot of the people who advocate “buying local” are economically misguided, but many of them aren’t, and ignoring the root of the problem, tilting at straw men isn’t going to make things any better. Arguments like Carden’s, in my opinion, are more likely to marginalize any honest analysis that seeks to address the root causes.