Globalization is a word that has no real meaning. It is used to defend the indefensible.
We are told that a perfectly profitable enterprise kicking our neighbors and their families to the curb and moving operations to an atheistic communist dictatorship is inevitable because of, well, globalization.
We are told that relying on a foreign power, even a hostile one, for the weapons our troops use to defend themselves and our country is acceptable because of globalization.
We are told that putting your neighbors, your community and your country first, before those on the other side of the world, is somehow wrong or old-fashioned because “we live in a globalized world.”
Politicians and other hucksters throw the word “globalization” around the same way a dirty street fighter kicks dust in your eyes before he kicks you in the gut.
The word “globalization” is used to get you to stop thinking. It’s a way of saying, “The world is too complicated for you to understand; just leave it to us experts.” This is exactly the philosophy that informed the progressive movement: Society is too complicated for the people to rule themselves; it’s time for elite technocrats to run the show.
The truth is, there is nothing new about globalization.
Over a half century ago, the seminal essay “I, Pencil” details how a simple pencil draws on components and labor sourced from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, California and elsewhere.
The British were big into “globalization.” They established outposts around the world to ensure raw materials and markets for their industries. The citizens of some of these settlements didn’t like the terms of the deal they were offered and dumped tea into Boston Harbor. Out of it came a new nation born in a trade war.
The British weren’t alone. The French, Spanish and Portuguese had similar arrangements around the world. They were called “empires,” not “globalization.”
Globalization by another name impelled the queen of Spain to pay an Italian named Columbus to sail the ocean blue in 1492 to find a way east bypassing Constantinople, which had just fallen under the Muslim sword. It drove Marco Polo to China in 1215 and Roman legionaries to the banks of the Euphrates a thousand years before. And thousands of years before that, Egyptians and Phoenicians sailed far and wide to source the advanced technology of the day, obsidian, used to make the sharpest arrowheads, ax blades and knives.
The point is that there is nothing new about “globalization” – human societies have always traded and exchanged goods across great distances.
The question is not whether we have “globalization” or not; it’s who sets the terms of the deal. In the worst cases, decisions are made by a closed, centralized elite, unaccountable to the rest of us who must live with their decisions. (See: Boston Tea Party, above.)
The globalist TransPacific Partnership is the latest example of a bad deal and must be rejected. Obama and his water carriers in the GOP leadership are pushing it as the inevitable next step in, yes, you guessed it, globalization. While they call the TransPacific Partnership “free trade,” Reason has said it’s neither about trade nor freedom, but bigger government, stricter laws and less accountability.
Tell your member of Congress to oppose Obama’s next power grab, and say no to giving him “fast track” authority to conclude the TransPacific Partnership.
