POLITICS REQUIRES BORDERS
Herman Daly is the best-know ecological economist in the world, and a protagonist of the anti-globalisation mvmt in the late 90s. Here he explains the crucial difference between international collaboration and globalism: bit.ly/2Qr4tMm [thread]
Herman Daly is the best-know ecological economist in the world, and a protagonist of the anti-globalisation mvmt in the late 90s. Here he explains the crucial difference between international collaboration and globalism: bit.ly/2Qr4tMm [thread]
In short, it's all about border. While international collaboration relies on the existence of sovereign nation-states bound by borders - the precondition of democratic politics -, globalism aims at eliminating borders and thus democratic politics. I'll let Daly speak for himself:
"Markets hate boundaries, but public policy, in the interest of the community, requires them. Since globalization is the erasure of national borders for economic purposes, it also comes close to being the elimination of national economic policy as well".
"In addition, it implies the eradication of international economic policy. Suppose all nations agreed to the Kyoto Accord. Then try to imagine how these nations could enforce domestically what they had agreed to internation- ally, when they have no control over their borders".
"International interdependence is to global integration as friendship is to marriage. All nations must be friends, but should not attempt multilateral marriage".
[This also applies to immigration]: "How could any national community maintain a minimum wage, a welfare program, medical care, or a public school system in the face of unlimited immigration? How could a nation punish its criminals and tax evaders if they were free to emigrate?".
"Indeed, would it not be a lot cheaper to encourage emigration of your poor, sick, and criminals, than to run welfare programs, charity hospitals, and prisons? Or how could a country reap the benefit of educational investments in its citizens if they were free to emigrate?".
"Would nations continue to make such investments in the face of free migration and a continuing "brain drain?" Would any country any longer try to limit its birth rate? With free migration it could never control its numbers anyway".
"Few would deny that some migration is a very good thing, but we are speaking here about free migration, where "free" means "deregulated, uncontrolled, unlimited," as in free trade or free capital mobility".
"Some cosmopolitans think that it is immoral to make any policy distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and therefore favor free migration. They also suggest that free migration is the shortest route to their vision of the summum bonum, equality of wages worldwide".
"Fair enough; let them then answer the questions in the preceding paragraph!" [end of thread]
