Bad trade economics

According to this essay at Conservative Home, someone called Anthony Makara thinks Britain imports too much. Which amounts to saying that Britain exports too much, given that, roughly, exports equal imports. Mr Makara writes

Well, for a start we are not making the goods to supply our domestic market anymore, we are importing those goods. So a radio that could have been made in Britain is being made in China instead and a Chinaman has work while the Briton that could have made that radio remains unemployed.

It should be pointed out to Mr Makara that the effect of trade on the total number of jobs in an economy is approximately zero. As Paul Krugman has written,

Constant employment is a reasonable approximation: The standard textbook version of the Ricardian model assumes full employment in both countries. But in reality unemployment is constantly a concern of economic policy -- so why is this the usual assumption? There are two answers. One -- the answer that Ricardo would have given -- is that international trade is a long-run issue, and that in the long run the economy has a natural self-correcting tendency to return to full employment. The other, more modern answer is that countries have central banks, which try to stabilize employment around the NAIRU; so that it makes sense to think of the Federal Reserve and its counterparts acting in the background to hold employment constant. This is not at all the way that non-economists think about the issue. Both supporters and opponents of free trade normally claim that their preferred policies will create jobs; free-traders are forever warning that the Smoot-Hawley tariff caused the Great Depression. And the alternative view does not come at all naturally. During the NAFTA debates I shared a podium with an experienced, highly regarded U.S. trade negotiator, a strong NAFTA suppporter. At one point a member of the audience asked me what I thought the effect of NAFTA would be on the number of jobs in the United States; when I replied "none", based on the standard arguments, the trade official exploded in anger: "It's remarks like that which explain why people hate economists!"

It should also be noted that in a similar way jobs could be created by stopping the use of modern technology. Just imagine how many more jobs there would be in the UK in the production of radios or any good for that matter, if only they would destroy all of their computers and other technology and replaced assembly line production with handicraft manufacturing. A great leap backwards is a good thing under Mr Makara's logic. Trade displaces (and creates) jobs in the same way as technology does.

Mr Makara goes on to say

I've nothing against trade when it is in the national interest, there will always be things we will need to import, items like coffee, bananas, and so on.

But the UK could produce these things and gain employment in doing so. So why doesn't Mr Makara want imports of "coffee, bananas, and so on" stopped? Its just that its uneconomical to do so, the UK doesn't have a comparative advantage in these goods. Of course it doesn't have a comparative advantage in the production of many other goods which is why they are imported as well.

Mr Makara should also consider that trade restrictions lower national income. On average, income in the UK would fall if it was to stop importing goods. Why you would want to make people poorer is not clear.

There are longer replies to Makara at Oxonomics and the Globalisation Institute.