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Globalism Is Good

By Marco den Ouden

December 15, 2021

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What’s in a word? Ayn Rand created an ongoing controversy by calling her book on ethics, The Virtue of Selfishness. This despite the fact that she went to great lengths to explain exactly what she meant.

In her introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness, she says people ask her why she uses the term to denote virtuous qualities of character. She answers that she does so for the very reason you are afraid of it. The concept, she says, has been subjected to an intellectual package deal in popular parlance, “a synonym of evil; the image it conjures up is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.” But, she says, this is not what it means. Simply put, selfishness means “concern with one’s own interests.”

She goes on to elaborate an ethics of egoism, of rational self-interest. She argues that the self-interests of rational men do not conflict. In Atlas Shrugged she plays this theme out in dramatic fashion. And she again provokes controversy by calling Galt’s Gulch, her hero’s enclave of men of the mind on strike, a Utopia of Greed. She even has a chapter called Anti-Greed except the people who are anti-greed in her novel are the villains, the parasites.

Globalism is another term that in common parlance has been abused and subject to a package deal.

Globalism, I maintain, is another term that in common parlance has been abused and subject to a package deal. The article on globalism in Wikipedia elaborates on a variety of definitions, often contradictory in nature. Definitions that range from justice globalism to jihad globalism to market globalism. (Notice the package deal—if you support globalism you’re some kind of jihadist.)

But the dominant idea that identifies globalism is, in fact, market capitalism. Sometimes called neoliberalism, meaning classical market liberalism, and globalization, meaning a world without restrictions on the free movement of goods and people. As the old saying goes, if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.

So I choose to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street: globalism is good. Gekko, you’ll recall was the villain of the movie, a corporate raider who bought underperforming companies, broke them up and sold the parts for a good profit. The famous line comes at the end of a speech to the shareholders of Teldar Paper, a company he is trying to take over. The rest of the speech is usually forgotten but it is worth bringing back as it serves to underline what his point was. It is an indictment of modern business management and calls for a return to essentials—the profit motive. It calls for the owners of the company, the shareholders, to take back the company from its nonowner management team.

“Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.”

Gekko goes on to specifically castigate the United States government as a “malfunctioning corporation.” “America has become a second-rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions.” A problem that has only intensified since the movie was made.

That puts a whole new spin on things. While Gekko was supposed to be a villain, the speech inspired many people to go into the securities business. Gekko was a flawed character, a character with questionable ethics, but his overall drive and spirit are the essence of the entrepreneurial spirit. The link to the speech excerpt is here.

His speech, while ostensibly a criticism of greed, was widely hailed as being right on the money by libertarians, particularly those inspired by Ayn Rand who developed an ethics of rational self-interest and refers to Galt’s Gulch, the community of strikers in Atlas Shrugged, as a utopia of greed. Stone was well aware of Rand’s work and had plans to do a remake of The Fountainhead at one time. Gekko’s speech could have been an indirect attack on Rand’s philosophy. Guilt by association. Gekko is a villain and extols greed. Rand extols greed. Hence her philosophy must be villainous. Bad logic but it works on unsophisticated people.

Today there is widespread condemnation from both left and right of globalism. So I want to state categorically that, from a libertarian perspective, globalism, like greed, is good.

Opposition to globalism from the left is not hard to fathom. They see it as global capitalism. As anti-capitalists, they loathe any spreading of a philosophy they see as hideous to the supposedly unsullied rest of the world.

What is harder to understand is the hostility towards globalism from the right, especially the alt-right and some elements within the conservative movement. Conservapedia, for example, defines globalism thus: “Globalism is the failed liberal authoritarian desire for a ‘one world’ view that rejects the important role of nations in protecting values and encouraging productivity. Globalism is anti-American in encouraging Americans to adopt a ‘world view’ rather than an ‘American view.'”

The conservatives see globalism as the antithesis of nationalism, and in particular, American nationalism.

Here we have the crux of the issue for conservatives and the alt-right. They see globalism as the antithesis of nationalism, and in particular, American nationalism.

Rand was absolutely correct in her assessment that, at its core, conservatism is anti-capitalist. She wrote that “Objectivists are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.”

Objectivism opposes nationalism and all other sorts of collectivist-isms. Rand herself wrote fervently against racism, another collectivist notion. Is it any wonder that right-wing anti-globalism is closely tied to white nationalism?

The early libertarian movement was strongly influenced by Rand and was solidly pro-capitalism. The modern libertarian movement has, unfortunately, lost sight of this. It is not uncommon for libertarians today to apologize for capitalism. To find common cause with the left and criticize capitalism, only they add a modifier and call it “crony capitalism.” This blurs the lines and distorts the argument. Indeed, I have seen some self-described libertarians take a hostile view of corporations and describe all corporations as “crony capitalism.”

Ayn Rand denounces crony capitalism but she never calls it that. The crony capitalists are the villains in Atlas Shrugged, the Orren Boyles of the world, the people who curry favour with the government to stifle competitors and line their own pockets. Her heroes are the creators, the men of genius, the men of independent thought, the men who seek no favours or special treatment, the self-actualizing men who get things done in the world of business. She is a champion of the entrepreneurial spirit which is the essence of capitalism.

Rand does not call her villains crony capitalists because she does not regard them as capitalists at all. They are parasites, moochers, second handers, and thieves.

Capitalism is NOT nationalism. Capitalism knows no borders. Capitalism is not an exclusively American phenomenon. And opposition to globalism is, at its core, an opposition to capitalism.

The alt-right is fond of trumpeting the threat to western civilization posed by foreign influences, particularly immigrants. They see freedom of movement, free migration, as a threat to western ideals. And they see free migration as part and parcel of that insidious philosophy of globalism. But as Foreign Policy points out in a recent article, “globalism is the victory of western ideals.” Globalism is the exportation of western ideals to the rest of the world.

Globalism is primarily an economic phenomenon widely known as globalization. Wikipedia notes:

The expansion of global markets liberalizes the economic activities of the exchange of goods and funds. Removal of cross-border trade barriers has made the formation of global markets more feasible. Advances in transportation, like the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships, and developments in telecommunication infrastructure, like the telegraph, Internet, and mobile phones, have been major factors in globalization and have generated further interdependence of economic and cultural activities around the globe.

Most anti-globalists ramble on about their opposition to globalism without clearly stating what exactly they are opposing. The article in Foreign Policy tries to address this lapse. Writer Paul Miller notes, “I am not the first person to ask skeptically: Just what is globalism? Trump and his supporters seem to equate it, depending on who they most need to criticize, at the moment, with free trade, international institutions, lax border enforcement, immigrants and immigration, cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism, cooperative security, disrespect for national traditions and culture, or an annual meeting at Davos.”

He goes on to say, “But much of the rest of what passes for “globalism” is actually the extraordinary spread of Western ideals of political and economic freedom. For example, another word for “free trade” is “capitalism,” one of the West’s great contributions to the world. If this is globalism, let us make the most of it. It is extraordinarily odd that the president of the United States would turn his back on Western economic ideas in the name of protecting and promoting American national identity.”

In his marvelous book, Eat the Rich, P.J. O’Rourke points out that trade restrictions with that bastion of communism, Cuba, has, in fact, helped to entrench communism, not to erode it. A libertarian as well as a humorist, O’Rourke opines that the trade embargo “gives Castro an excuse for everything that’s wrong with his rat-bag society. And free enterprise is supposed to be the antidote for socialism. We shouldn’t forbid American companies from doing business in Cuba, we should force them to do so.”

Much of this exportation of western ideals and western capitalism has taken over Asia. The four Tiger Economies, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, are economic powerhouses and bastions of capitalism. O’Rourke explores Hong Kong in his book. He sees it as “the best contemporary example of laissez-faire” in the world. He quotes John Cowperthwaite, the architect of the Hong Kong miracle who adopted a hands off approach to the economy: “… in the long run the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.”

These tiger economies spread and now include the Tiger Cubs—Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. The Wikipedia article on the Tiger Economies goes on to note that “in Latin America, the fast-growing and emerging economies, oriented to free trade and free market development are called the Pacific Pumas which consist of Mexico, Chile, Peru & Colombia.” Economies adopting capitalism and free trade are emerging in Africa as well. This is all part of a policy of globalism—freeing up borders to the movement of goods and people with a minimum of government restriction.

In his excellent book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley details some of the triumphs of this policy of international free trade, not just for the world but for the west as well. The first chapter, A Better Today: The Unprecedented Present should be mandatory reading for every doom and gloom soothsayer out there of whatever stripe. Ridley chronicles the incredible increase in prosperity for everyone that has resulted from international capitalism and free trade. One sub-section is called “The Declaration of Interdependence.” In it he argues that “self-sufficiency is not the route to prosperity.” He points out that trade enables us to improve our wealth through the division of labor and specialization. He cites Leonard Read’s classic essay I, Pencil which shows how an item as lowly as a pencil results from the input of many people from around the world, all brought together by the invisible hand that Adam Smith wrote about.

Ridley lays out some statistics that are truly astounding. “It is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than in 1955,” he writes. “The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his North Korean counterpart). The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent in twenty years.

“The rich have got richer but the poor have done even better. The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world, as a whole, between 1980 and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 percent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955. Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s.”

He notes that according to the United Nations, “poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.”

Not only has globalism increased wealth and prosperity worldwide, it has produced a more peaceful world. That may seem an incredible claim considering continuing wars in places like Syria and parts of Africa, but it is true.

In his monumental book, The Better Angels of Our Natures: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker describes the steady decline of violence over the centuries, a trend that continues to this day, despite blips like the World Wars which he considers anomalies. He writes about the Rights Revolutions: civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights. He writes about the reduction in infanticide and child abuse, the effective end of lynchings, the steady decrease in violence towards gays and the increased awareness of spousal abuse and its reduction as a result.

And he writes about the Long Peace. Since 1945 we have entered an unprecedented period of peace. He presents a detailed argument complete with supporting statistics to support his thesis. He looks for an explanation. The increase in the number of stable democracies is a factor. But an even larger factor is what he calls the Liberal Peace. “The Democratic Peace,” he writes, “is sometimes considered a special case of a Liberal Peace—’liberal’ in the sense of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on political and economic freedom, rather than left-liberalism. The theory of the Liberal Peace embraces as well the doctrine of gentle commerce, according to which trade is a form of reciprocal altruism which offers positive-sum benefits for both parties and gives a selfish stake in the well-being of the other.”

Pinker specifically mentions globalization noting that “history suggests many examples in which freer trade correlates with greater peace.” He cites the research of Bruce Russett and John Oneal. “They found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year.”

“Russett and Oneal,” he continues, “found it was not just the level of bilateral trade between nations in a pair that contributed to peace, but the dependence of each country on trade across the board: a country that is open to the global economy is less likely to find itself in a militarized dispute.” (emphasis added)

Some political scientists, he writes, have taken these findings “to entertain a heretical idea called the Capitalist Peace. The word liberal in Liberal Peace refers both to the political openness of democracy and to the economic openness of capitalism, and according to the Capitalist Peace heresy, it’s the economic openness that does most of the pacifying.”

Pinker concludes the section on the Liberal Peace with a quote from peace researcher Nils Petter Gleditsch who updated a popular 1960s anti-Vietnam War slogan to “Make money, not war!”

Miller, in his Foreign Policy article, writes, “When Thomas Jefferson wrote of the ‘self-evident’ truths about human equality and the accountability of government to the ‘consent of the governed,’ such ideas were ludicrous. Not a single other nation in the world believed in or accepted Enlightenment liberalism as the foundation of government. That is why we rightly call the United States an exceptional nation: It was uniquely founded on the idea of ordered liberty within a mixed federal republic.

“The post-Cold War era has seen the high tide of liberalism in all recorded human history. Over the very long run, the macro-narrative of history for last past quarter millennium has been the conversion of much of the world to American (and British) ways of thinking about politics and economics. It is nothing short of astonishing that much of the world now agrees with the United States about the ‘self-evident’ truths that it so lonesomely proclaimed at its birth. The spread of liberalism is not ‘globalism.’ It is the victory of American exceptionalism.”

Libertarians have and should continue to support globalism, which is, in fact, a policy of exporting liberal values of individual rights, peace, capitalism and free trade to the world at large.

The supposed libertarians who oppose globalism are deluded, narrowly focused, and parochial nationalists and anti-capitalists. Globalism means a decrease in government authority, a relaxing of trade barriers, and an easing of control of commerce and people.

It should be noted that one of the often-overlooked parts of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is Mobility Rights. These rights are as fundamental to freedom as the rights of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of association. They include “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.” They also include the right to move freely within Canada, to move from one province to another and to seek employment anywhere in Canada.

If people are trapped in an insular state that oppresses its people, the ability to leave and seek freedom and opportunity elsewhere is the most precious of all rights. Given the opportunity, people will naturally gravitate towards freedom and prosperity. Globalism encourages this natural inclination as well as puts pressures on governments to liberalize their economies and to improve individual rights.

Globalism is good.

 

 

 

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