Sometimes a particular product requires such huge investment in machinery and in developing a skilled labor force that the resulting output can be sold at a low enough price to be competitive only when some enormous amount of output is produced, because of what economists call “economies of scale.” If General Motors produced only a hundred Chevrolets, the cost per car would be astronomical, since all the expensive machinery and all the engineering research and development that went into creating the automobile would have to be recovered from the sale of just 100 vehicles. It has been estimated that the minimum output of automobiles needed to achieve an efficient cost per car is somewhere between 200,00 to 400,000 automobiles per year. Producing in such huge quantities is not a serious problem in a country of the size and wealth of the United States. But, in a country with a much smaller population—Australia, for example—there is no way to sell enough cars within the country to be...