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Comment by gonvaled | Hacker News Reader

> A bunch of elites decided to create their own trans-national utopia unchecked by borders and dismissed all criticism as racist or bigoted. The globalisation project has been rejected by a majority of the population.

The globalisation project is a consequence of:

1. People move: they have legs.

2. Technology has made moving easier and faster.

3. Technology has made keeping in touch in a decentralized network easier.

So it is not the elites, it is technology. You can try to stop it, by force, but you will not succeed and you will create lots of suffering.

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People always had legs. What's new is the idea people who live in a place have no right to decide who moves there.

Their legs were not so fast.

The Earth belongs to everybody.

No it doesn't. Your country belongs to you, but not other countries.

I do not have any country. Nothing belongs to me.

The country where I live has been built by lots of people, not least immigrants.

I have no problem with immigrants if they come here in accordance with our laws.

Which of the free trade agreements and IP and copyright rulings have hurt the masses, and which have helped? Which economic policies of globalization are helping Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Greece?

The folks passing those agreements are the "elites" by any stretch of the term.

The trade agreements are not to blame: they have increased trade, which should be good for everybody.

The opposing force, making globalization unfair for the masses, is unchecked capitalism, which has increased inequality by allowing financial elites to concentrate capital.

Trump, May et al are not goint to put any fight against inequality, so you will be surprised how little borders are going to help the poor.

> Which economic policies of globalization are helping Ireland

You mean, besides all the multinationals setting office in Ireland and opening positions? (and not only a "mail office")

iPhones are not an unstoppable force that can overcome national political movements of this scale.

Have you heard of: law ?

When law opposes fundamental human rights, like moving around, and working honestly wherever you want to, giving your best and fighting for your chances in any place in Earth that you decide to call your home, that law is unfair.

That's a great strawman you've got there. None of us would advocate such a law.

The fact is that while they sell you on "moving around", they also remove the market barriers that keep you employed and help you earn gas to move and a house to live in. That's the part of the thing you're not addressing.

So you tell me that they use tricks to sell you one (good) thing and implement another (bad thing)? And you think they are not going to continue to do that? Specially with somebody at the helm that has been privately doing exactly that for a long time?

The USA will need to compete in the global market to sell its products. That means the USA will need to use globalization in order to find the best place to produce with quality and to be able to compete in price.

So, retreating from globalization is not an option. You can avoid people entering the country, but this is not going to make your country any richer. And that is for sure not going to guarantee that inequality is going to decrease.

For that, you need to tackle inequality directly, by collaborating internationally to avoid loopholes (double Irish and such crap) that steals revenue from countries and concentrates in the hand of the global financial elite.

Trump is not going to do any of that.

Trump is going to do whatever it is he does before getting impeached--the sooner, the better.

What I'm driving at isn't just for the US--it's for all the countries. You can't bootstrap your economy by opening yourself to being exploited by multinationals, by shipping your resources off in the form of trinkets, regardless how many factory shirtmaker jobs it produces.

The problem of globalization is that it allows advanced economies to entrap developing markets, shipping them goods they don't develop locally--similarly, it guts advanced economies which are unwilling to compete (read: leverage externalities like polluting the air) with developing economies in certain sectors.

It also tends to end-run around local government by way of "harmonizing" accords, and makes governments subservient to the global market instead of the local people who they are supposed to govern.

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