/Ground: Globosclerosis and The Limits Of Open Markets

I take on David Brooks of the New York Times over at /Ground:

[from /Ground: Globosclerosis and The Limits Of Open Markets]

Brooks — despite being a columnist for the liberal New York Times — is conflating the supposed ‘openness’ and ‘liberalism’ of free trade with a long list of other ills: Dafur, Zimbabwe, and Iran. The supposed thread linking these various messes is the failure of the world’s power structures to align in an obvious way to fix the problems involved. And Brooks is right, in part, that in a multipolar world, it is increasingly unlikely that decisive action can be taken to quickly attack and resolve major issues. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the various world powers can even agree on a shared perspective for these issues.

It is time to rethink free trade, and not to lump it in with a long shopping list of other issues that require our support. It is distinct and different from countering genocide in Darfur, or opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

We need to oppose free trade that accelerates the depletion of the world’s aquifers and desertification, that dislocates rural populations and sends them as economic refugees to live in the slums of already overgrown megacities, and relies on Twentieth Century energy economics (including high costs of labor, cheap oil, low cost international transport, and treating the atmosphere as a sewer). Disguised in the hypothetical liberalizing impact of a globally linked and open economic agricultural system is the capacity to destroy local systems of food production and other localized economies, on a worldwide scale