localism and free trade
Nathan has returned to blogging with quite a bloggy manifesto on some of my favorite topics – namely, localism, capitalism, and the struggle between free trade and the cultural side-effects of a consumerist, corporatist society. It’s a long piece, and I’m not sure where to draw out bits from exactly (just read the whole thing). Suffice to say, Nathan struggles with much of what I struggled with in the early months of this blog. I dabbled a bit in distributism; pondered the ill-effects of corporations and consumerism on communities; and even, for a while, argued that perhaps it was our duty to obstruct free trade in order to somehow prop up an ailing blue-collar workforce.
Distributism, in the end, came to feel more like an ideal than a practical solution. What insufferable inequities exist in modern capitalist societies often do because of statist interventions into the market – corporate welfare and subsidies, protections of industries and bailouts, and so forth (crony-capitalism to put it bluntly). Governments are far better at shoring up power than at providing truly meaningful safety nets. What little the state can do to reverse these inequities, almost always communities left alone to self-govern can do better. [Read more →]
August 8, 2009 27 Comments
Questions on Globalization and Trade Part One
Free Trade vs. Protectionism
I share the larger, long-term goal of free trade with my libertarian counterparts. I think that a world highly interconnected by trade will be a more peaceful and prosperous world, so long as we can also determine ways to adequately protect our environment and find sustainable resources and energy to continue to drive the economy forward. However, I am more cynical as to the implementation of such widespread trade. I think that the reality is, with capitalism comes pain. The formula requires failure, because competition dictates that there be losers and winners. This is fine when it comes to corporations – a failed corporation, theoretically at least, will be replaced with a better competitor and that’s good for consumers, workers, and investors alike. However, failure does not stop at the company level, it also effects the human beings who work for these belly-up companies.
This leads to the necessity of social safety nets (discussed more in part 2) but also to the need for some sort of, for lack of a better word, pacing. I don’t believe in protection as an end in and of itself, but rather as a means to an end. Protection of national industry should be about maintaining a safe trade balance, a stable employment rate, etc. And it should be implemented in a temporary fashion, not ensuring the protection of one industry indefinitely, but rather promoting economic stability here at home while we achieve, gradually, freer trade globally. [Read more →]
June 25, 2009 30 Comments
