"The idea of comparative advantage works when there is a complex local economy intact in the background of each trading partner’s specialized item of production, with a variety of social roles and occupational niches to support the long-term project of [the] community. But a locality geared to doing only one thing for export is… a slave system based on the extractive economics of mining. […] One group had all the cheap labor, and another group had all the capital, and for a while, one group made all the things that the other group “consumed.” Thus, comparative advantage became, for a time, a con game strictly for the benefit of large corporations, which ended up enjoying all the advantages while the localities sucked up the costs."
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Chapter 6, p. 188.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
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The Long Emergency
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