This cartoon reminds us that globalisation might be good for the rich but not for workers.
When I first wrote this webpage, I tried first to explain the various different advantages and disadvantages of self-sufficiency and globalism in detail. But then the webpage grew far too large. So I had to give up and start again.
Fortunately our current “full belief” in globalism only started in about 1990. So we now have 25 years of experience of globalism and we can compare this time with the times before, when we protected our industries with import tariffs. So now we can see for ourselves what the effect of globalism has had on our lives. I will describe this under the 4 following headings.
This cartoon reminds us that cheap goods often come by exploiting the people of other countries.
Cheap Imported Products
Globalism has certainly given us all a glut of very cheap, imported products. In fact we have bought so much of the stuff, that we now need to hire specialists to help us de-junk our homes. All this is not necessarily a good thing. We really could afford to pay a little bit more for the products, which we could make ourselves.
Profits go up – but wages go down.
Wealth Distribution
Over these 25 years our wealthy people have grown much wealthier and our poor people have grown poorer. This is not surprising. Our rich people, who own our industries, could use cheap labourers from overseas to make these cheaper products. So they could make more money. And our own workers either lost their jobs or they had to work for less. Also our rich people could hide their profits overseas where they couldn’t be taxed.
So our rich have grown richer and our poor have grown poorer.
Variety
Importing from overseas and has certainly given us a huge variety of products to choose from. This choice has been rather fun.
But very powerful monopolies still arise even on this global stage. Thus, in the computer industry, the giants like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Google are supposed to be competing with each other. But these companies cleverly don’t compete on important fundamental issues of mutual interests. Thus Apple will not produce a good word-processor because they don’t want to upset the current balance of power with Microsoft. It should, in fact, be very easy for a person to put a webpage up onto the Internet. But, if it was easy, then many people in these big companies would loose their jobs. Stopping the formation of large monopolies will always be an extremely tricky subject.
In the world as a whole, variety is actually decreasing because our globalisation. Thus variety is usually measured in terms of the number of languages the world supports – and this number is decreasing all the time at an alarming rate.
Globalisation does not lead to a safe world.
Safety and Our Productive Capacity
The effect of globalisation is to make all nations to become dependent on each other. This is extremely unsafe because it means that, if one crucial nation is destroyed, then all the other nations are dragged down with it. And, if you look carefully at past history, you will find that nations (and even Empires) fail and disappear quite frequently. For all nations to become dependent on each other is extremely unsafe.
In previous ages nations often traded in terms of luxury items like: silks, gems, gold and perfumes. These items don’t matter at all. But to become dependent in items like food, transport items, medicines and essential appliances is simply insanely unsafe. We should always maintain our productive capacity so that we can to produce these essential items for ourselves.
If you look around the world at the moment, you will find that it is the small independent countries like: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland, that are doing quite well. But this is less true of the larger political systems like the E.U. or the USA. The general idea of amalgamating a set of small nations into a larger entity does not always work.
If you look around the world at the moment, you will find that it is the small independent countries like: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland, that are doing quite well. But this is less true of the larger political systems like the E.U. or the USA. The general idea of amalgamating a set of small nations into a larger entity does not always work.
What is risky to mankind as a whole is not necessarily risky to some older rich people.
In my work I show how a community can be self-sufficient in food, water and energy with only 100 people. This is all described in my webpages:
“Green Living”.
“Degrees of Being Green”
“The Benefits of Self-Sufficient Green Communities”, “Who Changes – We or the Climate”, “How this Green Living book came to be written”.
“A Campaign to form a Green Community”, “Declarations of Interest”, “My-Email-to-Barack-Obama”.
“Green Living – book”(pdf).
Also some of my webpages from my “The Ultimate Ascent” webpage show how this can be done.
You might now also like to look back at:
either my “Home Page” (which introduces this whole website and lists all my webpages),
or “Political_Fundamentals” (which introduces this major set of webpages).
My next normal webpage is: “Officers_or_A-Leader“.
Updated on 14/11/2016.