James Brooke has a piece today on the devastation facing Mongolia when the worldwide quotas on apparel end Jan 1 2005. I’ve previously mulled this over here and here.

What struck me with this piece was the observation that Brooke says that the end of the quotas would save American consumers $6 billion a year. That actually seems like a puny amount spread across the economy. And it seems miniscule to the potential global instability and poverty that is caused by the end of the quotas—instability and poverty that I think can be reasonably argued come back to cost Americans a lot more in regional conflicts, AIDS and a general economic collapse. After all, who is going to buy American-made products in the world if they have no jobs?