Sunday, when my grocery guy Lucio came to my gate, his truck contained, along with the usual variety of produce and other foodstuffs, a box of beautiful strawberries, which I snatched up along with my other purchases. As often in the past, these berries came from Driscoll’s in Watsonville, California, where—interestingly enough—they were almost certainly harvested by Mexican and Central American workers.
Out of curiosity, I looked up more information about this firm and found it to be even more interesting and entrepreneurial than I had previously imagined. My access to this product, here at the ends of the Mexican earth, I file under the rubric Miracles of the Market.
This situation—strawberries being grown in the USA and shipped to the far reaches of Mexico—illustrates one of the often-overlooked realities of international commerce: the same product is being exported and imported by each country.
Many strawberries are grown in Mexico and shipped to the USA for sale, as every American is probably aware. But strawberries are also grown in the USA and shipped to Mexico for sale. There is no contradiction or economic anomaly here.
Read the rest at independent.org.
TGIF: More on Menger and Value
Consumer goods are also called finished goods. The products we buy at the supermarket and other retail stores have, in less finished form, passed through many stages (including distribution), reaching back to the original factors of production: land and labor. Land...
