Well said in the video. Without internet and global trade this GB would not have happened. Globalization comes at a price -- well what else came without any -- and there are pushback but we just need to learn to deal with it.
Thanks!
Globalization is indeed commonly believed to come at a price (i.e., US manufacturing jobs), but is often said to be worth the ill effects. But if you actually look at the data and research, I would argue that the supposed ill effects are not even at all clear. And that's the thing that really irks me about the pushback you hear in some quarters. I think it's mostly about blind nationalism and fear of the foreign, not economics.
From what I can tell, certainly in aggregate, trade is always a win-win proposition for nations and for human productivity as a whole. While a tiny and already declining sector of the economy has diminished since the US signed its free trade agreements, far more jobs (higher-paying jobs that most Americans would rather have) have been gained by the overall expansion of the American (and global) economy. And, any American who is willing to be mobile to get work (as the Chinese certainly are), or to find ways of doing work online, can take advantage of that. Also, manufacturing still exists in the US; it's just very specialized and high-end—and organized around the kind of sectors that America focuses on nowadays—it's not hard to find prototyping shops here, for example.
I do kind of lament that it's hard to find local vendors who do various manufacturing trades because I'm the kind of guy who likes to go down to the workshop and see how stuff is made. But I wouldn't trade going back the American economy of the 1960s to have that luxury. Not even close. As I said in the video, in a pre-internet, pre-globalization world growing up in West Virginia, I would likely have had few options beyond being a coal miner and dying a premature death of black lung.
In any case, the proposed solution (tariffs) is just a way for the government to transfer money from people who don't work in the manufacturing sector (i.e., the vast majority of all Americans) by making them pay higher prices for all their goods in order to subsidize, Soviet-style, a small industry that the market has decided doesn't make practical sense in the US right now. It's hard for me to see how that's a good idea.
But, anyway, that's why I (thankfully!) no longer work in politics.
(As an aside: there is a valid case to be made that globalization fragilizes the world economy by making it more interconnected—and thus more likely to suffer booms and busts all the same time. I've been reading a lot of Nassim Nicholas Taleb lately, and I find this argument a compelling one, but not even he suggests we should turn back the clock and de-globalize, either culturally or economically. But this is a much more nuanced argument that calls for remedies other than tariffs, and one that I've never heard the America First crowd making.)