Re:All I know is... (Score 1)

You make a reasonable argument however you must take into consideration the audience you are addressing. Approximately one third of the population in the United States is economic dead weight. The individuals who decry free markets and long for state intervention generally come from that segment of the population. There are two reasons why they support such policies.

1. They directly benefit from the inefficiencies caused by such policies and generally don't care about the burden they place on the productive members of society.

2. They are not productive ( in part ) because they have difficulty correctly determining causal relationships between events.

You must understand that it is a waste of time to explain why unrestricted free trade is beneficial to ( productive ) society. The individuals who are capable of doing useful work already share your opinion and do not need to be convinced. The individuals who do not share your opinion cannot be convinced using reason. In order to explain why this is the case, it is necessary to understand the function of reason in both the productive and non-productive segments of society.

The productive members of society use reason as a tool to modify their environment. First they create a mental model which they apply to the environment. If things do not work as planned, they use reason to determine what was wrong with their mental model and modify it appropriately.

This can be contrasted with how reason is used within the non-production segment of society. They too create mental models of the environment which they apply to the environment. However, if things do not work as planned, they do not use reason to determine what was wrong with model ( and therefore do not modify it ). In their world there is no objective reality. To them, whatever they think is necessarily true and they use reason ( or at least a rhetorical semblance of reason ) to convince themselves and others why their model is correct rather than what would be indicated by the environment.

The only thing we ( the productive members of society ) can do is to try to produce as much as possible and stay as far away as we can from the non-productive members of society.

p.s.

Unfortunately that tends not to work in the general case because the useless members of society tend to also be the the ones most prone to violence ( against the productive members of society ).