Are you for or against globalization?

I’m neither for nor against globalization, per se. What I oppose are the very existence of corporations, entities that exist only under the wording of the law. They’re owned by nobody, and nobody has any real culpability for their behavior. Yet they have tremendous clout in politics and control over our lives. I believe that businesses should be owned by people who are directly responsible and accountable for them. And if a private owner can grow a business internationally, I have no problem with that.

Great question, I find my self undergoing great internal conflict. We have to globalize, it’s the only way to go at this point. No one nation can build a ship to go to mars, no one nation can eradicate poverty, and so on. To progress any further we are going to have to globalize, this is probably the best we can do as a species while we remain fragmented.

The problem is, it’s us humans we are talking about here. We have a great potential to screw things up, and globalizing could be the mother of all fuck ups if we are not careful. It could lead to a distopian dictatorship the likes of which we have never seen before.

Maybe we just need to keep doing what we are doing for another half a million years or so.

I’m for the globalization of human rights, environmental laws, consumer protections, and labor rights. I’m not for the type of globalization we have seen, which has primarily been in the form of investor-rights agreements (NAFTA, etc.).

Globalization helps people all over the world live better lives. Interrupting free trade might help a few people in a nation—mainly people working for companies that can’t compete. But it hurts most of us. Yeah a few people will lose jobs in free trade, but most of us will be better off. Just look at what cheap Chinese goods have done for us.

For the globe?....yep.

It is happening and like the tide coming in there is no stopping it. I am not in favour of it, I think that small is beautiful and that one day the filthy tide of globalisation will recede. I just hope it doesn’t cause too much damage.

As @flutherother points out, globalization like the tide, it’s kind of a “sea change,” an economic and historical force like the Industrial Revolution. It’s happening, it’s coming, and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. I just hope it’s not entirely Borg-like, even though resistance may be futile, I would hate to see the incredible cultural diversity that human being have managed to create over the millennia be “assimilated” into one big “mono-culture,” particularly one that makes us all consuming-work bots, robots caught in an endless cycle of overwork, production, and consumption to the exclusion of all else.

I can’t say I’m against it but if I think about it we’ll lose a lot of cultures by doing so. You’ll be forced to somehow obey that “pro” culture yet you can’t. Expanding at a global scale will only help out a few in the top while the rest won’t feel any change at all yet they will be surrounded by a bunch of others who are their equals/neighbours but actually don’t know a thing about them.
Can’t say there will be a real harm in it but a lot of things will disappear.

I’m always a little conflicted on this topic. At heart I want the world wide open. I wish there were no borders, that we were all people of the planet. But, of couse this idealism is impossible in todays world. I do want balance and fairness in our trade policies, and I think that is lacking. I look at my country, the US, and we are so large, with many climates, and probably could sustain ourselves if we took on an isolationalist policy, but it in the end is counter to what I feel helps us grow and evolve. International influences and ideas should not be kept out. @Hibernate‘s point is very interesting to me, that a lot of things will dissappear. Kind of like how some of our neighborhoods in America have all started to look alike, losing their uniquiness.

I think in the end I would like a balance. To keep our culture, but also interact with other cultures. To be welcomed into other countries and to welcome people, products, and ideas.

It just is. Nothing to be for or against.

@poisonedantidote “No one nation can build a ship to go to mars”… and that’s important?

@Adagio Lol. The metaphor is that it takes a bunch of nations of the human race to do something for the better good of mankind…

@HungryGuy Great answer.

For.

I also have no problem with multinational corporations in principle. And I’m a flaming liberal.

I don’t understand why liberals want corporations to be loyal to a given nation. I also think nationalism is one of the worst, most arbitrary and most potentially harmful ideologies in history.

We are all in this together. I’d argue that the world has been globalized to some extent since 1492. The Great Depression was a global depression. And so I support our economy—and the regulatory structure of that economy—reflecting the fact that our world and our welfare is connected.

The trick is to make the regulatory structure of the global economy work for the interests of the majority of people, rather than the wealthiest classes.

Sectioning off the global economy into parochial fiefdoms will not do anything to alleviate the problems people are complaining about in this thread.

@Hibernate, I have no problem if cultures are lost. Cultures are not people. They don’t deserve respect and aren’t entitled to existence. In fact many cultures are oppressive and horrible to the people who are unfortunate enough to be born in them.

Cultures should be documented, for future study and for history. But cultures have no moral valence. People do.

Being against globalization is like being for poverty.

In general, it makes sense to buy food locally as much as possible, because it reduces the need for transport.

Otherwise I recommend to be a bit careful about promoting “Buy American” or “Buy European”. For example, if more and more Americans are refusing to buy European products in an act of patriotism this will lead to more and more Europeans refusing to buy American products. A key driving force of human progress over the past 10,000 years has been specialization of labor combined with growing trade. Undoing all this destroys wealth and spreads poverty. So Germans should keep buying Oracle licenses from America, and Americans should keep buying medical instruments or green technology from Germany.

To me a more important factor is the condition of workers creating the product. If people get a fair salary and have the right to form unions making fair deals with employers in China, I would not have a problem buying Chinese products. If people are treated like work slaves I do. But I can afford to pay more for products tied to fair trade. People with low income are often forced to buy inexpensive products tied to unfair trade.