Hume's ideas about why trading with other countries is beneficial:
1. Trade leads to competition which makes goods better and cheaper for others. For example, if Japan develops a cheap hybrid that has a 20 year warranty, American manufacturers have pressure to make it better, which will mean improvements in everyones lives.
2. If you don't trade with other countries, you won't expose yourself to new ideas, and therefore you won't learn from them, and therefore you won't be innovative, and therefore people won't be motivated to improve their own lives.
3. If you don't trade with other countries, you don't get the division of labor that comes with everyone giving their own skills to the best of their abilities. This helps the spontaneous order happen that allows people to tacitly cooperate and put goods on the shelves.
Adam Smith's idea of Laissez Faire:
People should trade with whoever they want as long as it doesn't harm anybody else. It wasn't a completely free market system because Smith believed that governments were necessary to help people not harm anyone else in their trade. The role of government is to enforce contracts and allow people to have rights to property, peaceful exchange, equality under the law, and facilitates the division of labor.
The Source of Wealth is the ability to produce and exchange goods. For example, if people say that the Patriots losing made us poorer, then their loss would have had to make it harder for us to produce and exchange goods.
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