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It is not considered necessary also to calculate the losses to Ballbearings R Us’s suppliers, and to their suppliers, and so on, should Acme decide to buy its parts elsewhere: in an economy based on voluntary exchange, we are not given a veto over other people’s business decisions, or the right to force them to do business with us. (The exceptions are takeovers that put the buyer in a position of monopolistic power — for then they could force others to do business with them.)

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Only when the buyer comes from outside our borders does the state feel entitled to step in between buyer and seller, on behalf of a variety of interests with little in common save that none of them are parties to the transaction. Thus is the buyer obliged to employ this number of workers, to buy from this supplier and so on, all in the name of ensuring the transaction is of “net benefit,” not to the buyer or the seller, but to “Canada” — a test whose precise requirements are never revealed to him, and which at the end of the process he may be told he could not have passed anyway, no matter what undertakings he might have made.

And so far as this costs the buyer, it also costs the seller, who is deprived of the full price of his shares. This uncompensated expropriation of a part of his assets, he will be glad to learn, is all in the name of preserving Canadian “ownership.”

The process, in short, is entirely arbitrary. No economic logic compels politicians to discriminate between foreign and domestic takeovers. They do it for the same reason people in politics do most things: because they can. The sooner we take that power away from them — for example, by reversing the onus, converting the “net benefit” rule to one of “net harm” — the better.