Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by practicalpants 1914 days ago
The idea of it being wrong to have a "my country first" government is a pretty unusual one, because the alternative is having prosperity fleeced by rivals. It's like a tech company saying they aren't going to compete anymore and slowly give away assets while lowering employee salaries. Would love to move beyond nationalism but you simply can't when the world's second largest economy (perhaps first soon) is the most ethnic-nationalistic country in recent history.
2 comments

The alternative is cooperation. Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic when US states were in a bidding war over PPE and the US federal government was seizing PPE shipments going to Canada? That went away with better inter-state and state-federal cooperation, not more nationalism (or state-ism or whatever). Why should the procedure that works for US states, Canadian provinces, and EU member states (i.e. distributing doses based on population) not work on a larger scale?
I think there are a few high profile examples where nationalism caused some problems...
... fuelled by appeasement of democracies...
The rise of Hitler was due to the German people, not the democracies that brought Germany back to sanity
Democracies missed plenty of chances to bring sanity back at much much lower costs. Be it not intervening at Rhein remilitarisation or Czechoslovakia giveaway