Judging by the comments to my last post, by some of the defenses of Sanders I’ve seen, and by articles by people like Stephen Macedo, many people think something like the following is a good argument for trade or immigration restrictions:

1. The government of a just democratic society has special fiduciary duties to promote the welfare of its citizens over the citizens of other societies. 2. Principles of social justice or distributive justice are primarily principles governing distributions within a society, rather than between or among societies. 3. Therefore, governments can be justified in restricting immigration or closing off trade if doing so helps promote distributive justice among their own citizens.

Let’s grant 1 and 2 for the sake of argument. (IMO, 1 is plausible, but 2 is not.) Even if we grant 1 and 2, 3 doesn’t follow.

1 and 2 might explain why, say, Sweden has reasons to pay for social benefits and welfare services for its own quite rich citizens instead of using that money to help genuinely poor people in the rest of the world. But fiduciary obligations do not permit you to use violence against or violate the rights or harm others in order to help those to whom you have a special obligation.

For instance, I have special duties to my children. It’s within my prerogative to buy my sons toys for their birthdays rather than spend the money saving others’ lives. But suppose, in order to get Keaton the Imaginext Megazord play set, it turns out I would need to scare away my next door neighbor from buying it first. That wouldn’t license me to to that. It’s morally wrong to use violence and threats of violence against other people, and to stop them from making mutually beneficial interactions, in order to get my kid a present he doesn’t really need.

Similarly, a lawyer may favor promoting the welfare of his client over non-clients. But he can’t kill the prosecutor or  threaten to kill the prosecutor’s kids in order to make sure his client goes free.

When a first world government forbids trade across borders, it does not just use violence against its own citizens. It also does so against citizens of other countries. Perhaps there is some justification for doing so. (Actually, there isn’t.) But the “We may prioritize our citizens’ welfare first” argument doesn’t do the trick.

For more, see this post.

Some Sanders supporters say that Sanders doesn’t want to restrict trade; he just wants to make trade “fair”. But this argument, in Sanders’ case and others, is a smoke screen. It’s the argument first-world rent seekers have been using for 30 years. “We need to protect third world workers from exploitation. And we need to protect ourselves from unfair competition. So, to do that, we’re going to impose trade restrictions, which just so happen to have the effect of making it so that third world workers just lose their jobs and you’re forced to buy from us instead. We’re such nice people!”