[High Praise! to Call Me Stormy]
[YouTube direct link] (Viewer #12,892)
Pay close attention at the 57 second mark, because this point cannot be emphasized enough:
“Specialization and trade make everyone better off even if one person is ABSOLUTELY BETTER AT EVERYTHING than his trading partners.”
There’s no excuse not to be a capitalist.
Kind of like the Justice League. I mean, you have Superman and everyone else, but they all have their specialties, like Aquaman, and—
Oh, the hell with it. It’s past my bedtime.
“Specialization and trade make everyone better off even if one person is ABSOLUTELY BETTER AT EVERYTHING than his trading partners.”
This is Ricardo’s law, named in honor of the great British economist David Ricardo, who first propounded it. It has been called the only thing in economics that is neither obvious nor trivial.
More on David Ricardo here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo
And about Ricardo’s law here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo%27s_law
I remember the first time that I encountered it. I found it astonishing, even though I had already studied economics.