Globalisation: Free Trade Needs Rules, Not the World Bank

We’ve talked quite a bit about ‘fat tails’ in these pages...about events that lie so far outside the normal course of events that we tend to push them equally far away in our consciousness, events that are so devastating that when they do occur they cancel out every other consideration. There may be only a very slim chance that the human race will be wiped off the face of the earth, it is true. But it would probably be a good idea to take that slim chance very seriously.

Still, just because a fat-tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favour of more, say, government regulations on food production?

Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.

So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad cheques, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.

You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do - whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms - but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.

This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable positions on globalisation: it’s A Very Good Thing or A Very Bad Thing. But slogans don’t always do the trick. Each problem has to be thought through in its own terms. Not only is globalisation neither entirely good nor entirely bad, it is not even one single thing. It is several. It is about free trade and costly subsidies, about gourmet water and junk food, about hard capital and soft drinks - all of which have their own reasons for being and their own consequences, and all of which are mislabelled, poorly understood, and constantly confused. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of about globalisation is that it provokes extremes of two emotions in the mob - greed and fear. In other words, the only certain thing about it is that it is a public spectacle.

Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalisation is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic takes to insulin.

Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade - like driving - needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.

Many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork and privileges in the first place.

Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighbourhood savings and loan—a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn’t call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank’s boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:

“Helping the poorest of the world to lift themselves out of poverty is a noble mission or, as former Secretary of State George Shultz said, ‘a beautiful mission’.”

But, the Sisters of Charity do not have to worry about the competition. Wolfowitz has been one of Washington’s biggest hawks since the days when he argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. To this day, he likes to praise Indonesia’s Suharto, who in his 32-year reign looted US$30 billion from the public treasury and turned his country into one of the most corrupt in the world. Of course, on second thoughts, that might be the perfect resume for the Bank. After all, the World Bank has a bit of a track record when it comes to getting and spending, not to mention laying waste.

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning Australia

P.S. to get The Daily Reckoning direct to your inbox sign up to our free e-mail newsletter or if you prefer to use RSS, subscribe to the Daily Reckoning RSS feed.

Related Articles:

• None Found