November 29, 2019

The evil of globalization or beggar thy neighbor.

This is not to say that trade is never mutually beneficial: trade and capital flows have been an economic reality for over 3,000 years, dating back to the very lively trade of the Bronze Age. What does need to be challenged is the largely unexamined notion that the critical interests of political entities (nation-states) and societies are magically served by private capital maximizing returns via borderless global markets.[1]
And via slave labor wages overseas and other governments' disregard of environmental protections (thereby enabling lower cost foreign production).

This reminds me of something that Fran Porretto recently quoted from Thomas Jefferson:

Liberty is unobstructed action according to our will; but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.
This singleminded pursuit of lower production cost illustrates Jefferson's "liberty." Our corporations scrambled to relocate tens of thousands of American factories to China utterly without regard to the effect this would have on the economic fortunes of their fellow citizens at home.

Adam Smith thought that the "invisible hand" would necessarily benefit the larger whole even though the individual would vigorously only seek to promote his own interests. Little did Smith foresee that his and all other Western lands would come to be ruled by traitors who drooled at the prospect of

  • operating in foreign lands to the primary benefit of foreigners and
  • importing parasitic, hostile, inassimilable foreigners to the home country by the millions.

Salus populi to our elites is as abhorrent a concept as swearing to protect and defend the Constitution.

Notes
[1] "We Can Only Choose One: Our National Economy Or Globalization." By Charles Hugh Smith, ZeroHedge, 11/26/19.

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