http://www.reason.com/0312/fe.ng.poor.shtml December 2003
Poor Man’s Hero
Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world.
Interviewed by Nick Gillespie
If there is any moral certainty underpinning today’s anti-globalization movement, it’s that desperate actions -- from sometimes violent street demonstrations to public crop burnings to dressing up as giant sea turtles - - are needed to protect the traditions, forests, and human rights of the Third World against the rapacious greed of the First. The anti-globo left has little doubt that anyone who favors international free trade, open markets, and the cultural mongrelization they foster must be a greedy corporate bastard hellbent on plundering the world’s poor and chopping down the last tree left on the planet. On the right, if George W. Bush is any indication, a different sort of blindness is at work: It’s OK to pass nakedly protectionist legislation as long as you talk a good game about favoring free trade.
This is why Johan Norberg, a 30-year-old Swede with roots in the anarchist left, is so important. He is the author of In Defense of Global Capitalism, which makes a powerful moral and economic case for globalization. Norberg throws rhetorical Molotov cocktails both at left-wing critics who would condemn developing countries to poverty by insisting on First World workplace and environmental standards as a prerequisite for trade and at Western governments whose free market rhetoric is shamefully undercut by draconian tariffs on textiles and agriculture, the two areas in which the developing world can actually compete.
Norberg focuses on the human dimension of globalization, how increased and
freer trade is the best way to help the wretched of the earth. A bestseller
in Sweden when it appeared there in 2001, In Defense of Global Capitalism
is a richly detailed and nuanced brief in favor of globalization. It was
translated for British audiences by the influential London free market
think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. The Cato Institute has just
released a new and updated American translation by Roger Tanner (with help
from reason Associate Editor Julian Sanchez, who previously worked at Cato)
. <SNIP>
> ...draconian tariffs on textiles and agriculture, see,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/opinion/30TUE1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/harvesting-poverty.html?pagewanted=all
-- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm