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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

Globalism is, and will continue to, happen no matter what the US does. The US needs to figure out how to make it work for the long term. Protectionism won't work. You might as well be a cooper or haberdasher trying to pass laws to keep people using barrels and hats.

People keep trying to either spin globalism as evil or good, but it's neither. It's just something that was going to happen no matter what. The US does not have a say in whether it happens. If the US doesn't figure out a way to make it work for them, then they'll be replaced by whichever country does.

The answer is not passing laws for tariffs or thinking the US can race to the bottom with low wages and manufacturing. The world desperately needs advanced technology and medicine, and the US should be focused on that, not stupidly trying to compete with literally every other single country on Earth on things any country can produce.

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Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

You are also misunderstanding by conflating globalism with free trade. The two are related, but not the same. You can be for free trade of goods and services, but not for unelected central powers (i.e. an EU, a central bank).

Mainstream academic economists are typically free trade, but we have no science to test this theory so just br careful about drinking too much of the kool aid. LarGe corps, banks, and US gov generally want globalism. Keep in mind why they want that (profit and power). We still have a lot of people suffering in 2017 and no longer a good excuse for it (i.e. resources scarcity cant explain malnutrition anymore).

Globalism != Globalisation

The EU is unelected? Member countries send their own representatives to the EU Parliament; they send council members to the European Council.

The ECB is nominated by the EC.

The U.S. Federal Reserve commissioners and chairman are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Many would consider that unelected. I'm sure you draw the line somewhere too: I doubt you consider every government employee elected just because you can draw a chain of responsibility back to some elected official.

Please don't backpedal by going into the definition of the word. The rhetorical value of "unelected" was to paint the EU and Federal Reserve as unrepresentative.

Hell, by your logic, the U.S. Senate before the 20th Century wasn't elected because they were elected by state legislatures instead of popular elections.

You are simply and flatly factually wrong about this, sorry. I encourage you to check out the textbook definition of the Fed as well as technocracy. You can also Google 'differences b/w a technocracy and democracy.' The Fed is widely accepted by every piece of academic literature Ive ever come across to be a technocracy, and that is the word we use to describe it. Also, the EU can and should be thought of at least being largely technocratic as well.

You're the only person in this thread to talk about "democracy vs technocracy," debating a point I never made.

When you were arguing about how the EU and Fed are, in your opinion, elected, I thought you would be able to make the connection. They aren't considered elected officials in the standard sense we think about it--in a democratic sense--and no one thinks that. They are unelected by any plain interpretation of democracy. That's the reason the word technocracy is used to describe them.

> Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

It's worked pretty well here for doctors and pharma.

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