By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, July 06, 2016
If there has been a bogeyman in politics this year, it
has been “globalization.” While Brexit was seen by many as the latest rejection
of the globalization that has been the mainstay of international economics
since the end of the Second World War, American politicians, both left and
right, have also turned against it.
Donald Trump is, of course, the high priest of
anti-globalization. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to
the false song of globalism,” he swears. Bernie Sanders too complains that “the
increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s
economic elite, is failing people everywhere.” And, while Hillary Clinton
seldom uses the actual term “globalization,” she often echoes the complaints of
anti-globalists, especially on trade issues.
But the bitter denunciations of globalization miss the
mark.
First, let’s understand what globalization is and is not.
Despite the paranoid fantasies of the Internet, globalization has nothing to do
with some nefarious plot to impose world government. It is not about United
Nations control or some mythical North American Union. It has little to do with
the bureaucratic nightmare of the European Union. Nor does it entail the
military intervention and nation building popular in some neoconservative
circles. Rather, globalization is simply about the free movement of goods,
capital, people, and ideas around the world and across borders.
And we are much better off because of it. Globalization
has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty worldwide. As recently
as 1990, nearly 2 billion people, 37 percent of the world’s population, lived
in extreme poverty — that is, with incomes of less than $1.90 per day. Today,
that is true of just 9.6 percent of the world’s population — barely 700 million
people. That’s an enormous reduction in human misery that can be traced to
globalization.
But what about this country? The Peterson Institute for
International Economics estimates that past gains from U.S. trade and
liberalization of investment range from $9,270 to $16,842 per household.
Another study found that that “a 1 percent increase in trade raises real income
by 0.5 percent.” Other research finds that the trade flowing from globalization
has increased consumer purchasing power for middle-income households by 29 percent.
As for the poor, they benefit most from the availability of low-cost goods,
seeing as much as a 62 percent increase in purchasing power over what they
would have in a world without trade.
Yes, of course there are losers as well as winners.
Economic gains are never evenly distributed. When we moved from horse-drawn
carriages to automobiles, people who worked in the buggy-whip industry were
losers. But that hardly means that we should halt economic progress in order to
protect every job that currently exists, or that we should artificially prop up
wages in declining industries. If anything, government has been too involved in
protecting certain industries and occupations from global competition.
Anti-globalization is not just anti-trade or
anti-immigration — it is the gateway drug to big government. Milton Friedman
pointed out that “Interferences with international trade appear innocuous; they
can get the support of people who are otherwise apprehensive of interference by
government into economic affairs; many a business man even regards them as part
of the ‘American Way of Life’; yet there are few interferences which are
capable of spreading so far and ultimately being so destructive of free
enterprise.”
In the end, though, globalization is not just about
economic growth. It is about freedom — the freedom to travel, the freedom to
buy and sell, the freedom to work, and the freedom to hire and fire. It treats
every person not as a member of some tribe, but as an individual, with the same
natural rights as every other person.
As Frédéric Bastiat, one of the earliest
classical-liberal economists, warned:
Exchange,
like property, is a natural right.
Every citizen who has produced or acquired a product should have the option of
applying it immediately to his own use or of transferring it to whoever on the
face of the earth agrees to give him in exchange the object of his desires. To
deprive him of this option when he has committed no act contrary to public order
and good morals, and solely to satisfy the convenience of another citizen, is
to legitimize an act of plunder and to violate the law of justice.
Perhaps that focus on individual rights is one reason
why studies show that the free flow of goods, people, capital, and ideas, as
an overview from the Council of Economic Advisers noted, “helps reduce
discrimination and furthers social inclusion. Research has documented a
decrease in discrimination-based wage gaps based on gender, race, and
immigration status in the aftermath of increased trade. Research also confirms
that greater openness to trade, as measured by lower tariff rates, is
correlated with better human-rights conditions.”
America is a great nation, the world’s leading economic
power. As such, we should welcome a world in which there are few if any
barriers. We don’t need to cower behind walls or fear international
competition. If we can do more to help those left behind, let’s do so. If we
can increase our competitiveness by cutting taxes and regulations, it is long
past time. And we should recognize, as Ronald Reagan did, that “The freer the
flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and peace among
nations.”
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