The trade balance perspective is a pretty interesting one :P If the locals spend money at your store, how does it get back to the locals so they can buy more stuff? Is the entire cycle good for the locals (typical import/export), or is there a tragedy of the commons problem (the people hurt aren't necessarily the same ones who shop at your store)?
But what I was mainly thinking of was labor distribution. The economy is (from the pragmatist perspective) a system for distributing goods and labor to where they'll benefit people, better than a central planner could do it. If goods were previously produced locally, and now you import them, that's not making the distribution of goods worse, but it can make the distribution of labor worse, imposing costs on the local economy. Moving people around is a pain.
The store hires locals to man it, and pays taxes at the local rates. The local currency (henceforth: lc, symbol #) can only be exchanged for foreign currency (henceforth: dollars, $) if there are things which can be purchased using the local currency that people who have foreign currency want. If the lc isn't worth anything, nobody can make a profit buying bread for dollars and selling the bread for lc.
I think that it is overwhelmingly likely that the areas with the highest unemployment will have the lowest labor costs; If that is the case, the businessman...
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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