RE KRUGMAN'S RARE AND FOOLISH EDITORIAL TODAY NYT

For some of us, he points out the long obvious. I could not disagree more with what I take to be an underlying assumption of Krugman's essay, assuming as it inevitably does, a liberal lazy fare international economic order, divorced from politics as such.

You see, lazy fare does assume a separation of economics from politics.

The 'rare and foolish', is not China, but those lazy fare nations and their economics profession, most notably the United States, which have long catered to, and been the lazy fare engine for, developmental nations like, now especially, China;

which, once they get to sufficient size, inevitably flex their new overbearing advantage (hardly just the 'comparative' or 'competitive' variety). As a matter of fact, whatever could be economically wrong about charging a premium, or not even agreeing to sell, any of some rare and valuable minerals held within a nation state's borders under its ownership?

And if foreigners are gullible enough to buy some of that domestic supply, don't they risk non lazy fare techniques, where those supplies 'compete' with the supply of that nation state?

E H CARR has some rewarding passages on the subject, mirroring also my views, in The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, Ch. 8 INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, SECTION (b) ECONOMIC POWER, SUB SUBS "The Separation of Economics from Politics", "Some Fallacies of the Separation of Economics from Politics", "Autarky".

His quotation from Hamilton is especially nice, given that he was British.