Bingo! You're completely right. I cringe whenever I see someone drag out Ricardo's comparative advantage BS, dating from the 1800's. Economics, as it is taught

Bingo! You're completely right. I cringe whenever I see someone drag out Ricardo's comparative advantage BS, dating from the 1800's. Economics, as it is taught in the schools, opposed to the real world of business, is mostly fiction. Sure, you can demonstrate the validity of comparative advantage on paper using a simple matrix of Guns & Butter, and because it's so simple we get all these Randroids who believe they understand how the world truly works through the lens of basic freshman level math. But these Macroecon textbooks are also wearing the kid gloves for the benefit of innumerate undergrads in order to pass off an illusion as scientific fact. (Econ is the dismal science after all). Instead, let's scale the Guns & Butter matrix up to 1,000,000 variables, which is still embarassingly low compared to the complexity of real life, and let's add a time dimension too. Now just try to find the fucking comparative advantage! Good luck even finding the eigenvalues of that matrix before the heat death of the Universe. And if you happen to get lucky and find some minimum, you won't be able to know if it's global or if you're going to be wandering around in a false local minimum for eternity. Faced with this kind of uncertainty, your smartest evolutionary move is to grab whatever you can buy or sell and defend it within your territory. Period. Ricardo's theorem is to economics as play-dough is to architecture. I often amuse myself by wondering this: what if our entire idea that our post-modern global society has transitioned to free trade and free markets is a delusion, a folie a deux, a cynical ploy by the rich & powerful to control everyone, and in fact historical mercantilism is still the basis of global political economy? Just look at the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve sometime and ask yourself if hoarding currency is still the primary determinant of a nation's wealth? Sure, we've changed the language we use to describe it, we've changed the playing field itself, added incomparable technology, and re-shuffled the boundaries and identities of nations through a few world wars, all underneath an expanding teleological architectonic of democracy and freedom around the world, but ultimately everything is still the same basic pattern being played out across the nations. Hoard currency! Perhaps mercantilism & protectionism is the only Game theoretic dominant economic strategy for any nation or collective group?