According to this view Western nations have grown fat and lazy. To compete with the dynamic, efficient economies of Asia we've got to cut costs. There may be pain in the short run but at the end of the day natural comparative advantages will allow all countries to emerge as winners. An integral part of this 'globalization' thesis is the push by powerful corporations for 'free trade'. Governments pledge their allegiance to it.
Business claims it as the natural order of economic life.
And naysayers are dismissed as petty 'protectionists' fighting old battles, unwilling to aid the spread of prosperity. We can witness this lobby in full feeding frenzy at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. GATT is the international organization which hammers out the rules on world trade for its 108 member countries which control 90 per cent of all international trade. And we can glimpse part of the globalists' future plans in Washington's 'Enterprise for the Americas Initiative', an ambitious effort to create one vast market from Tierra del Fuego to the high Arctic. As soon as corporations are free to move across borders and labour isn't, the theory falls apart.