Trade is in the news again, with just today, several politicians—including our president—saying that the US needs tariffs to restrict trade. It is relatively easy to conclude that trade is evil, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In a perfect world, every country would embrace free trade, resulting in a happier and more prosperous world. And in a perfect world, I would be out putting on my private 36-hole golf course—not writing this blog. Since the world isn’t perfect and several nations are imposing strict tariffs on imported American goods, our president may be correct: perhaps we do need to adjust our tariffs, if only to encourage other countries to return to a policy of free trade.
Free trade is simply the scandalous idea that consenting adults should be allowed to swap what they have for what they want, without a parade of gatekeepers, forms, committees, and a policy memo citing “stakeholders.” It turns “this is useless to me” into “this might be perfect for you,” and it turns “you have what I want” into “let’s negotiate,” instead of “let’s regulate each other into mutual disappointment.”
Voluntary exchange scales beautifully, bureaucratic micromanagement does not, and the fastest way to make everyone worse off is to appoint the most self-righteous person in the seminar as the Director of Fairness and let them decide who deserves the snacks.
If you teach school, there’s a simple, low-effort way to show students why free trade keeps getting invited back into the conversation, even after everyone swears they’re done with it. It takes about ten minutes, requires no permission slips, and will cost you roughly thirty dollars, which is also known as “two-thirds of a teacher’s weekly budget for joy.”
Step one: go to the nearest dollar store and buy thirty random items. Candy, a puzzle book, a wine glass, a bag of potato chips, and a tiny flashlight that will stop working the moment it feels unappreciated. The details do not matter. (In fact, the more chaotic the assortment, the better.) You want a table that looks like a garage sale held during a mild panic.
Hand out the items so that every student gets one. Tell them they may inspect their items, but not open them, consume them, or break them. (In other words, you are running the most realistic economy imaginable.) They may, however, show them off to classmates, which will immediately create envy, disappointment, and the first great moral lesson of the day.
Now have everyone hold up one to five fingers to show how satisfied they are, with one meaning “this is basically trash” and five meaning “this fulfills my wildest dreams and I would like to name it.” Mentally add up the scores. In most classrooms, the total will land somewhere around 40 to 50, because fate has distributed the wine glass to the kid who wants gummy worms, and the gummy worms to the kid who wanted literally anything else.
Round three: remove the training wheels. Tell them they may make their final trade with any willing student in the room. Two minutes of frantic swapping later, do the finger-rating one more time. Typically, the total jumps to 100+, and the classroom briefly resembles a commodities exchange, minus the suits and with more arguing over sour candy.
Then you deliver the punchline: no new items entered the room. Nobody manufactured anything. Nobody discovered a gold mine behind the whiteboard. And yet, the class’s total “wealth”—measured as “how much people value what they have”—went up. Why? Because trade helps stuff move from the people who don’t want it to the people who do. And the fewer the restrictions, the easier that happens.
In other words: trade creates wealth—not by making more things, but by getting the same things into better hands.
Trade does more than shuffle stuff around until everyone is happier with what they’re holding. It also does something quietly civilizing: it teaches respect for private property.
Start with the classroom experiment. Thirty random dollar-store items get scattered among thirty students, and the universe instantly proves it has a sense of humor. Somebody gets a puzzle book and wants candy. Somebody gets candy and wants anything that would not melt in their backpack. At first, the room is full of low-grade disappointment, plus that one student who is absurdly thrilled to receive a tiny panda plush, because the world is unfair in both directions.
Now, here’s the key point: the moment you announce that trading is allowed, the entire tone changes. Students stop talking like pirates and start talking like shopkeepers. They ask, “What do you want for that?” instead of, “Hand it over.” They begin to persuade. They bargain. They look for mutual advantage. They also discover very quickly that the whole game collapses if people don’t treat possession as legitimate.
Because trade only works if your item is actually yours.
In the first round, students are told they can examine the item, show it off, and complain loudly about it, but they cannot open it, eat it, or break it. That restriction is not there to ruin anyone’s fun. It is there because private property is not just the right to hold something; it is the responsibility not to destroy what you might later exchange. A candy bar is a tradable asset until you bite it… After that, it is just evidence.
Then come the trades. Watch what students do when they want something. They don’t snatch it, they negotiate for it. They offer something in return, and—this part is crucial—they accept “no” as a valid answer. Not always happily, but they accept it. They start to understand that consent is not a decorative extra—it is the foundation.
Private property sounds lofty until you realize it’s the only barrier between “exchange” and “chaos.” If anyone can take what they like, there is no reason to offer a better deal, no reason to keep promises, and no reason to plan. Everyone’s effort goes into guarding, hiding, and grabbing. In other words, the classroom turns from an economy into a feeding frenzy.
Trade is a practical lesson in boundaries because it teaches that ownership matters, not because the object is sacred, but because respecting ownership is what makes cooperation possible. When people can say, “This is mine,” and have it mean something, they can also say, “Let’s make a deal,” and have that mean something, too.
While trade creates wealth, it also creates something harder to measure and—arguably—:more important: the habit of respecting other people’s rights, because it turns out that a peaceful “swap” is a lot more profitable than a messy “take.”
Respect for private property is not just a domestic virtue: scaled up, it is one of the quiet foundations of peace among nations.
When a country treats property rights as legitimate—contracts honored, assets not arbitrarily seized, rules applied predictably—it becomes a safer place for foreigners to buy, sell, invest, and cooperate. That, in turn, predictability lowers the temptation to use political pressure, covert coercion, or military force to “secure” resources that could be obtained through normal commerce. In plain terms: if you can reliably purchase what you need, you are less likely to try to take it.
Property rights also strengthen diplomacy because they make agreements credible. Treaties, trade deals, and cross-border projects are all just contracts with flags on them. If a government has a reputation for confiscation, default, or expropriation, other states treat promises as temporary and hedge accordingly—often by building exclusionary alliances, by stockpiling weapons, and by preparing for confrontation.
Finally, respect for property supports trade, and trade creates mutual stakes. When businesses, workers, and consumers in two countries find mutual benefit from ongoing exchange, leaders pay a higher political price for conflict that disrupts it.
Nations that can trust boundaries—territorial and economic—find fewer reasons to test them violently and find a whole lot of good reasons to respect them.
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