Economic isolationism and nationalistic thought have never been part of the Democratic party

[RB TexLa]

I know we have a large group here that will fall in against this but screaming at the clouds won't stop the future.


Why we should be defending globalization


The dynamic argument in favour of trade is simple – innovation requires scale, and scale requires trade. The incentives of firms and individuals to invest effort, time, and resources in generating new ways of producing valuable goods and services are intrinsically related to their ability to use the resulting knowledge repeatedly. This replicability underlies the scale economies that form the basis of much of modern growth theory. At no point in history have these forces been more evident than now. Ideas generate products that are replicated millions, or even billions, of times in a matter of a few years, and companies can go from just a few programmers in a garage to a multi-billion dollar business in a decade. Clearly, the ability of firms to sell the goods and services they invent and improve depends on their capacity to reach their costumers cheaply and efficiently. The result is an obvious, and often tragically neglected, link between trade and growth. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, echoes this simple insight: “I wish for a week that we could shut down trade and then Boeing, Microsoft, Hollywood, pharma would resize [downsize] their R&D departments… people would go ‘Holy smokes, that was not a very good deal’.”


Society’s suspicion towards immigration is likewise distorted by a static, short-run view. When foreigners enter a country, they use up land and other fixed factors, and get access to public goods and services. The result is more congestion, as fixed resources have to be shared between more people. If immigrants do not fully pay for these fixed factors and public services, the autochthonous population loses. Even if the foreign residents are made to foot the bill, the citizens who do not own part of the fixed factors still suffer, as their marginal productivity gets eroded and their income declines. The basic economic logic of this argument is sound, but its premise is flawed – fixed factors are less fixed than they appear, and technology evolves endogenously, partly as a result of immigration.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/why-we-should-be-defending-globalization?utm_content=buffer3a85e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[Hoyt]

1. Good luck with this. In primaries, trading among ourselves was the answer.

I think trade is the only way we can afford to pay for Healthcare, debt minimized education, jobs programs, guaranteed income or some plan to deal with jobs permanently displaced by technology, etc.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

2. You are quite brave I must say