Candlestick Makers' Petition (1845)
While satirical discourses can make for fun reading, they often obscure the complexity of the issue at hand and need to be taken with a heaping pile of salt.  Here is a counter-analogy to the one advanced in this letter:<p>Imagine a world where each nation is essentially a person (this isn&#x27;t strictly necessary, but the intuition to follow comes more easily when we think of our own lives, where we have a great deal more experience).  Now let&#x27;s say that Carla is a more efficient farmer, miner, and homebuilder than I, and that she has agreed to help me with those matters in exchange for some of my money.  In a world where all people are benevolent and will provide stable help in perpetuity, this is a fine bargain; but in any other case it requires much more scrutiny.  My money reserves are finite, but my need for food and resources stretches into the temporal horizon.  Then I need to very carefully evaluate whether my sources of revenue are sufficient and sufficiently stable to sustain this agreement; I need to have a good backup plan if Carla can&#x27;t come through for me in a time of need; and further, I need to be very assured that Carla and I won&#x27;t come into later conflict in which she would be advantaged by suddenly withholding her goods and services.<p>This isn&#x27;t to argue entirely in favor of domestic self-sufficiency; there&#x27;s plenty of evidence that an interdependent web of trade correlates with greater international stability and peace, which (all else being equal) seems good.  The point, however, is that the issue is really very nuanced.  How sure are you that your dependence on another nation is a safe and stable dependency?  What&#x27;s the damage, and how quickly can you adapt, if the status quo changes?  Those questions are entirely irrelevant when discussing the sun&#x27;s impact on producers of light--the sun is (on our timescale) stable and has no motives.  So while this bit of writing may be a good counterpoint to some minor point in the debate in which it&#x27;s situated, it really seems overly reductive in the broader context of international trade.