Written by Bhekuzulu Khumalo
Tuesday, 03 April 2007
From time to time I receive an email from Robert Tracinski, who operates a site with a very American right leaning philosophy.
I like to read across the political spectrum as one needs to know what others think in order to be able to come up with decisions that are not clouded by a narrow perspective. While I do not agree with everything that Robert Tracinski writes I do agree with him when he argues that people forget probably the most important achievement of the 20th and 21st century is global trade.
This is such an obviously great achievement if one thinks about it. For decades, maybe centuries, there have been those wise people who talked of people trading with one another for more than economic reasons. When people trade they appreciate each other more, prejudices decrease and when people are interdependent, they are not likely to go to war as they would rather find a common dialogue to ensure that trade and wealth continues to grow. More...
Article courtesy of Rightthinker
1 comment:
Hi Bhekuzulu,
Here are my comments on your article. This is an area I have a great interest in. I hope I could write an academic paper responding to your claims, but I cannot now, but am sure that a great deal of them I will address in my Master's thesis, which I will share with you.
"...the most important achievement of the 20th and 21st century is global trade". I am glad that you used important, but not progressive. While trade has been important in coming up with all sorts of goods, unfortunately only a few people enjoy this "achievement".
"When people trade they appreciate each other more, prejudices decrease" - This is not true. Look at the number of conflicts and marginalisation that comes with the greed and aggression in order to dominate trade. I refer you to a few readers - Greg Buckman on Global Trade, UNDP Human Development Report, 2005, Philip McMichael on Development and Social Change, Global Capitalism, edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, A System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. For starters, global trade has deepened poverty as opposed to extricating many from poverty. You can't say because a person who has been forced off his land, or retrenched and lives in poverty, is lifted out of poverty because his condition has improved by US$5 per year. In this midst, services become privatized and that person is expected to buy almost everything using that $5. Remember that social services provision has been cut drastically.
"Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of global trade barriers falling" - Millions of millions of people were thrown into poverty when the global trade barriers were dismantled. And this is even evident in many of the, unfortunately meek attempts to reverse the damage through programmes like Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Overseas Development Aid, etc.
Not only has global trade impoverished the people, but the very environment where its sustenance is derived. Proponents of this intensified global trade have all along denied the destructive nature of their activity until recently when they are faced with reality of climate change. They flatly denied the science of climate change and they said even if there was a climate crisis, technology will take care of it. But now they have come to face reality.
Global trade has this interesting and yet and dangerous tendency to consume the very ingredients that make it function.
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