(10-04-2012, 02:29 AM)ShadowHM Wrote: When I import goods, I export local currency. Agreed. Exactly how that will 'find its way' back to my national economy is not clear to me at all.
Well, what can you do with Canadian dollars? Buy stuff in Canada. That's it. There's nothing else to use them for.* Either you buy a Canadian product, or hire a Canadian to perform a service for you, or invest in a Canadian company, who uses that money to buy stuff in Canada. You could sell your $CDN on to someone else, but then the same thing would apply to that person.
And, in the exceptional case where a dragon just hoards a gigantic stack of $CDN outside our borders, that money is effectively taken out of circulation, causing our currency to appreciate. But since we have a central bank, they can just neutralize the effects, and nothing happens.
Quote:Selling our natural resources wouldn't bother me quite as much if it didn't destroy the environment so thoroughly.
Oh, I'd be happy to trade Alberta's oil wealth, and the corresponding best-in-the-developed-world employment figures, to prevent the environmental damage. But that's a different issue - we're talking here about the relationship between trade and employment: does buying local mean more local jobs?
Quote:Buying from a country that has (little to no) environmental protection rules or labour protection rules, and hence lower costs just strikes me as exporting a problem today for a loss further down the road.
I would like to see more rigorous reform and enforcement of labour and environmental laws in exporting countries. What I'd like more than that, though, is the first world to liberalize its migration laws, so that these workers were not trapped in their countries of origin, and thus had some bargaining power against their oppressors.
-Jester
*Okay, you can impress stupid people by lighting cigars with them, you can wallpaper your walls, etc... but every time they do that, it's literally free stuff for Canada, imports that require no corresponding export.