[santiagogo]

Completely agree. As someone who lives in a developing country, it always seems funny to me how there is frequently a distorted view in developed countries of how globalization should work, where they get all the upsides but none of the competition.

Everybody loves the idea of selling in a global market, but few realize that with globalization there are more opportunities, but also that they will have to work harder, study more and be more creative to compete for businesses, jobs and assets, with billions of people who previously had little to no opportunities, but who are willing to put in a lot of effort to compete for a share of the global marketplace. The trickiest part is that with technology and education, globalization is inevitable in the long term, no matter what politicians do or think.

From my view, sometimes it looks hypocritical when people from developed countries criticize the local 1% and the rigged system and unfair privilege that keep rich people rich, but then demand and expect that they get those same advantages on a country wide level, without realizing that they are simply defending the global 1% because it benefits/affects them directly.

[CoongLiu]

In this context, the objection is to laundering.

Within a developed and healthy economy, corruption is ideally minimised and caught by regulation.

Poorer developing countries are more prone to corruption and fraud, because there are not as many pooled resources to stop it.

The grandparent post is pretty clearly taking umbrage with those people attempting to circumvent the few systems in place. A motivation for doing that, is because a shifting their resources to a stable and developed economy legitimises their assets.

Those assets are often the result of raping their own country. People literally die, as money is stolen and taken from them.

This has nothing to do with accepting competition as a result of globalisation. It is however correlated with it, as open borders and trade makes it possible.

In a lot of ways, it mimics 19th century imperialism, where small countries were raped for their assets by foreign powers. The key difference being that, in these cases, the abuse and exploitation comes from within

[mistermann]

Global globalization may be inevitable, but I don't really see why individual countries must accept it entirely. Why can't you pick and choose which parts to engage in, knowingly accepting the positive or negative consequences that come with that? I see very little reason why large advanced countries like the US can't decide to restrict some free trade and take the 10% or whatever hit to GDP, in exchange for greater control and less uncertainty. This may be a naive belief, but specifically why?

[santiagogo]

What I would see as problematic is that picking and choosing parts of globalization would probably involve limiting the development of technology, commerce, and in some cases limiting free speech. And depending on the restrictions put in place to limit it, it could end up becoming sort of a global discrimination program which leads up to social conflict or even a war. There is also a conflicting part in your statement, where if for example the US took a 10% hit in GDP, it would in real terms mean that unemployment would double or triple, education, health and the base of society in general would take a huge hit, besides loosing global military and economic leadership, probably leading to huge political instability which lead to less control and more uncertainty (which could give space for a dictatorship, an internal war or a slew of other social problems). Economic growth is sort of like a drug, because once you have a society hooked up and dependent on it, if you take it away cold turkey, everything else that society has built will come crashing.

[mistermann]

Well, if just one simple action such as one country even partially opting out of globalization could lead to a world war, then I'd prefer to cancel the whole undertaking asap. Countries and civilizations have existed largely independently for centuries, if we've build ourselves a house of cards that can come down that easily, getting self sufficient and extracting yourself seems like pretty simple common sense.