(Free trade fills stomachs)

Free trade is the foundation of economic growth. Economics 101. Prosperity for Dummies.

Yes, you might need or want some intervention in the trade markets to account for e.g. unevenly regulated pollution costs or other unfairly shifted burdens. These should be laser-targeted at leveling the playing field, not leveling economies.

But some of our dumbest historical blunders have been tariffs.

They aren’t called trade wars for nothing – there will be costly loss and waste for all.

So I let an eloquent and visionary Canadian speak for us all today:

Morning in the Burned House
Margaret Atwood

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can't see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child's feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

From Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Co., published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart, Inc. All rights reserved.

As the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, you may have expected her to show up here in something about the increasing efforts to subjugate women- I reserve the right to return to her work for that as well!

Cover image credit: https://www.ragedandconfused.com/there-is-no-spoon-the-desire-to-wake-up/