Post by cjm on Jul 18, 2020 7:56:07 GMT
[The link is behind a wall, but a simple subscription is sufficient to access it]
Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would.
Krugman is an asshole notwitstanding his Nobel prize. In any event, these days I view with disdain anything published in the NYT (which is his mouthpiece). They are nothing more than a Democrat propaganda rag.
The way Krugman et al talk about workers (and particularly American ones) reflects an attitude of unbridled superiority and a readiness to view and use them as mere things. I think the Covid19 virus has, in any event, hit globalisation very hard. In the future countries will have, at least, to take a hard look at the necessity of local production.
The power of multinationals (as always, monopolies are the pits) capable of outsourcing jobs is a major problem in the free trade equation. Again, the epidemic has thrown a spanner into outsourcing as well.
Another major problem is on the political front because very often countries like China can keep their workers without the rights they would enjoy elsewhere such as the right to strike for better working conditions and to organize into trade unions. This means that those countries can keep wages low, which of course draws the multinationals from elsewhere. There also is the tendency to become a global player at the expense even of the sovereignty of foreign countries.
Milton Freedman (not quoted anymore) used to say that economic freedom and political freedom are linked. You cannot have the one without the other.
So, in part summary, what used to amaze me is the ready global acceptance of China's repressive regime (do I have to draw the South African parallel ?). Economics does not even enter except in the Freedman sense: only the readiness to benefit from brutality. This attitude has changed at least partly thanks to Trump.
The amazing thing about Krugman's (et al's) response in the article quoted is that he now admits that he was wrong in a "narrow sense" ("Krugman maintains that his new mea culpa “was a fairly narrow one” " - in fact, he was wrong about everything related to Trump), but he still has the audacity to attack Trump based on the same facts.