I’m not altogether opposed to the idea of free trade. Countries should be able to trade with one another in a relatively frictionless way. However global free trade breaks down when you get some countries who legally or illegally subsidise their industry and services in order to undercut other nations and globalism can end up destroying as much as it creates. Globalist free trade is great but as we are increasingly seeing it’s not the be all and end all.
Globalism has been an utter disaster for the working classes of many countries and has been especially damaging to the working classes of Western nations. Things that could have been made in Western nations such as shoes, electronics, clothes and much more are made in third world sweatshops and then shipped half way around the world to customers in the West.
Globalism also attacks communities and nations by treating the citizens of these nations not as citizens connected to their communities and their nations but as fungible pawns to be moved around or discarded at will or even replaced by much cheaper third worlders via mass immigration. Globalism allows Western elites to embark on lunatic net zero policies because energy intensive but strategically vital industries can be offshored to the far east for example leaving some Western nations such as the UK unable to produce virgin steel which is a vital component of high end industrial and defence products.
Daniel Salt the commentator from the Politically Homeless blog has done an excellent piece on how the new tarrifs introduced by the US administration of Donald Trump could spell the welcome death of globalisation. It’s worth reading his whole piece but this part of Mr Salt’s piece truly echoed many of my own views about the failures of globalisation.
Mr Saltsaid:
So tariffs and more tariffs and hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Pass me the shotgun and I will happily shoot the system through the face and then we can bury it face down with a stake through its heart. I have no time for it or for its proponents, especially my former comrades. We need cheap energy and reindustrialisation. I want to see nice shiny factories being built across the wasteland which is much of the West and I want it yesterday. If the current crop of hand wringing liberals which make up most of the British and European political class won’t do this well no problem because it looks like they will get wiped out shortly.
We need this for our national security but also for our political security because people have had enough. Populism isn’t rising in a vacuum - it is not people being led astray from the wise ways by evil men and women. No, it is the understandable reaction of millions of people against an economic and political system which has failed them and their families for decades. They can see their countries and societies rotting into the ground and they have had enough. They want change and they want some sense of hope for the future which I can understand as I desperately want it myself.*
He’s correct on this. Globalism does need to be buried and Western nations do need to reindustrialise and to do that will take the complete abandonment of the net zero folly as well as abandoning the elite’s deluded views about the ‘international order’. Mr Salt is also correct about populism in that it is not emerging from a political vacuum or because Western working class people have been hoodwinked by demagogues. This populism is coming because people are completely pissed off with how their countries have been mismanaged or worse managed for the benefit of incomers or transnational businesses. It’s clear that the middle class liberals and the globalists who have run Western nations into the ground over the course of nearly half a century have failed dismally to act in the interests of the people of the nations they’ve mismanaged and there is a dire need for change and change that comes soon.