this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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I donโt get this article, is it assuming that everyone thought globalization was a good thing?
Iโm pretty sure what happened was politicians just did it and gaslit everyone saying it will be good for the economy.
Globalization IS a good thing. Many people didn't like globalization and free trade because while being a huge productivity boost overall it was also a large wealth transfer to many of the poorest nations on Earth. And they used this math to make some very convincing arguments that we were "falling behind" and "living standards were declining" and maybe in some cases the speed of that wealth transfer did go too far. But mostly what was really happening was simply that other countries were catching up and this is not a bad thing unless you consider those people sub-human.
I don't consider people in other countries sub-human so I think our goal should be to make the entire world a nice and equitable place to live for everybody, because having a nice world that everyone can live in benefits us personally and the rising tide will lift all boats and we can finally start to put all this horror and war and injustice behind us and try to focus on things that actually improve our civilization together. This is not a zero sum game, we do not have to steal from the very poor to make our own poor richer, we can gradually fix the historical inequality to bring everybody up to the same level without causing too much stress to ourselves if we just adjust our expectations a little and frame it in the right way.
The thing that was actually bad about free trade was that some very non-democratic, non-free countries abused it, monopolized manufacturing of entire industries and bribed us with very cheap products about it so we didn't mind very much. We let our enemies, actual enemies who abuse their own populations and want to destroy us and take everything in the world for themselves and abuse us too, use it against us. It's not free trade that's bad, it's the tyrants running these evil despotic regimes that we are too lazy and peaceful to do anything about. They lied to us and pretended that they were being reasonably democratic and we knew they were sort of lying but we gave them a passing grade anyway and let them carry on. Nobody minds that they torture their own people or work them to death when they're importing their nice cheap goods at a great price.
It seems like we hoped that if we provided them a good economy, freedom would follow. But that's putting the cart before the horse. Freedom must come first, then economy can follow. By tolerating evil, by letting free trade support and provide for that evil, we allowed that evil to infect us and now we're feeling the pain of what evil left unchecked will do to the world.
So now it's time to prepare for a war to defeat evil once again, because we let it happen.
Sweatshop labor is a gift, says standard libertarian take. All those bottom-of-the-barrel economies are doin' fucking great.
You seem to miss that my entire argument was predicated on the countries we free trade with being properly aligned with us first, once we have shared values then we can trade freely with all the things we share values on, which should be almost everything. Free democratic countries around the world large and small were doing fucking great with free trade until the broken nominal democracies and despotic dictatorships started to hijack the system for their own gain. We should never have been trading with them the way we did, I am anything but a libertarian, but I am absolutely a humanist and a globalist on the whole. I don't mourn the death of the current system of globalization because it has been corrupted likely beyond repair and has failed at its goals, like you pointed out and that I agree with, but in principle I support the idea, but only with like-minded aligned countries that support human rights and progress. Otherwise we're not just wasting our time we're actually economically supporting that evil. I don't believe in that.
'Remember when outsourcing was good?' is not better. The US didn't give a shit about human rights in South Korea, and they're one of the countries we like. They were aligned in the sense they did what corporate and military interests wanted.
I don't consider the US to be aligned with my values. I didn't then, and I certainly don't now.