Politician: We should impose a tariff on imported fruit to make it cost consumers more than domestic fruit. Otherwis...

shunhe on July 30, 2020

Hi @partv,

Thanks for the question! So let’s recap what’s going on here first. The politician argues that we should impose a tariff on imported fruit to make it cost more than domestic fruit. If we don’t, then other countries will sell their better, cheaper fruit here, which will put domestic fruit producers out of business, and then farmland will be converted to more lucrative industrial uses and a unique way of life will go away.

Now we’re looking for a principle to which the politician’s recommendation most closely conforms. So let’s take a look at (C) first, which tells us that the principle is that social concerns should sometimes take precedence over economic efficiency. Well, this definitely seems to be something that the politician’s recommendation conforms to. Here, the social concern is about the unique way of life (of fruit growing, I guess). And the economic efficiency would be the more lucrative industrial uses. Some people might say that’s good, so let the domestic fruit growers go out of business. But no, the politician disagrees, and one good way to explain why is because sometimes, social concerns (like preserving the #fruitgrowerlife) trump economic ones (like having industries). So (C) seems pretty good.

Now (D) says that the principle is that a country should put the interests of its own citizens ahead of those of citizens of other countries. But the problem here is that it’s too big of a leap to say that keeping the domestic fruit growers in business is in the interests of the country’s citizens as a whole. It’s entirely possible that what’s truly in the interests of the country’s citizens is to have cheaper, better fruit (even if it’s imported), and to have industries (since that might boost the GDP or something). So we can’t say that imposing the tariff is in the interests of the country’s own citizens in the first place, and that alone is enough to get rid of (D) as an answer choice.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.