Deconstructing anti-globalization
While there are many things that statists quarrel about, with as much evidence to support their respective views (that is, none), there is one thing they all agree about. They all agree that freedom of trade - globalization - is a great evil that everyone, especially the poor people of the planet, must be protected against. Instead, we must all close our borders and support "self-sufficiency". Since capitalism is exploitation, they believe, restricting the exploitation to a local level will do less damage. Protectionism and isolation is the only solution to the world's woes.
Yet this is blatantly counter-intuitive. The benefits of free trade are acknowledged by most economists. Even conceptually, the notion that forbidding foreigners from trading with the people of a given country can help that country seems contradictory : if it wasn't in their interest to trade with the foreigners and thus enable economic progress, it just wouldn't happen. People do not buy foreign products because they are anti-patriotic, they buy them because of their price or quality.
Any study would only confirm the obvious : more job possibilities and more imports means better living conditions. Empirically, these results are confirmed. Here in North America, NAFTA has made Canada and Mexico most important trade partners with the United States, turned Mexico away from socialism and depressions, and American unemployment dropped from 6.9% in 1993, to 4% in 2000 ("NAFTA at 10 : An Economic and Foreign Policy Success", Center for Trade Policy Studies, December 2002).
The same thing is true on a global scale. Economic freedom is on the rise, including trade freedom, and this helps everyone. While poverty is still a world problem, the 1$-a-day poverty rate in 1985-value dollars has dropped from 20% in 1976, to 5% in 1998 ("The Disturbing "Rise" of Global Income Inequality", by professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin).
Likewise, the 1$-a-day poverty rate in 2002 dollars has fallen steadily since 1950, going from 63% to 12% ("Imagine There's No Country: Poverty, Inequality and Growth in the Era of Globalization", Institute for International Economics).
There are two simple reasons why globalization raises the level of life. First, opening the job market to foreign companies raises the demand for workers, which raises wages. And foreign factories would especially be interested in attracting workers, given their higher manpower needs and the hostility of the Western world against them.
Nike factories, for example, routinely pay twice the wages of local factories and three times the wages of local farms. When Wal-Mart stopped hiring teenagers in Bangladesh, according to UNICEF, many of them had to turn to prostitution ("Give Me a Break" with John Stossel, October 2003). Where work is attacked, workers lose.
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