Why invest your money where you get a 5 % return if you can invest it where you get a 10 % return?

And if I have understood all this right, even with free movement of capital we have no problem with free trade when Portugal has an absolute advantage for making wine and England an absolute advantage at making cloth. The problems arrive when Portugal is better at both making wine and cloth, the English capital goes to Portugal but the English labourers can't follow. Still the English get both cheaper wine and cloth than without free trade, but that doesn't help much now that they haven't got any income to pay for it, even if it's cheaper.

The whole elegant counterintiutive boon of the comparative advantage of free trade even when Portugal is better than England at everything, goes away.

Pity.

(Or I might have completely misunderstood what you are saying)

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.