"An economist is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing"
Free Trade and Globalization are human history's greatest failures without any comparison. No policy has/will lead to more environmental and human degradation than these schemes have already wrought. Nevertheless, apologists for failure are ubiquitous. No magnitude of failure is too large for them to paper over with free money, and non-stop bullshit. They've alchemized failure into success for untold human toll.
Where this ends is in mass personal and corporate bankruptcy. Zombies have had eight years to realize the party is over and to get their affairs in order. To them it was just another chance to double down on proven failure, at the behest of serial psychopaths.
The seeds of failure for Globalization lie in the fantasy economic theory of Comparative Advantage - the failed premise that two countries can successfully conduct trade even if one nation has competitive advantage in industry. This was a proven failure in Spain during the 1600s when the British used Mercantilist policies to essentially bankrupt Spain and otherwise free it from its burden of excess gold. All of Asia now practices export Mercantilism with studied precision which has alleviated the U.S. of thousands of factories, millions of jobs, and entire industries. In exchange, receiving cheap junk and trillions in debt. That's the "system".
"The notion, now being put about by the Conservatives of all people, that trade between our two countries should be restricted on account of the low wages paid to Chinese workers is protectionism of the rankest kind. So far as China’s comparative advantage lies in low-wage, labour-intensive production, it is to our interest as much as China’s to import those goods from them, and to focus scarce productive resources in areas of our own greatest relative efficiency."
In other words, according to Coyne and today's free traders, China has "comparative advantage" in poverty exploitation and environmental degradation. Which frees up Canada to provide resource extraction and money laundering services via real estate. The U.S. jobless consumer is freed up for Cappuccino production and debt accumulation. The spent human "byproduct" from this scheme is freed up to discover fentanyl overdose in a back alley. Coyne and his ilk will be the last to learn that this is not a sustainable "system", and therefore their entire life's work is but a joke.
Of course, what all economists don't understand is the financial concept of arbitrage, which means buying in one market and selling in another market until both are equalized. Which is what has been happening compliments of global multinationals.
In the eight year event, that has led the entire developed world to be equalized with the Third World, but just in the exact opposite way that proponents of Globalization predicted. That is the magic of competitive advantage and mercantilism masquerading as comparative advantage while copious dunces look the other way.
Ex-human history's largest money printing bubble, the arbitrage is already complete. The developed world now exhibits the same propensity for rapacious exploitation found in the rest of the world.
Therefore I don't know what will save capitalism. But I do know that all indications are that capitalism does not want to be saved. Because taking failed ideas to level '11' is a recipe for revolution.
"The poll shows Americans oppose the Republican tax-cut effort by nearly two-to-one, as 29 percent approve and 53 percent disapprove. That's a worse showing than Obamacare ever recorded, and more unpopular than former President Bill Clinton's tax increase plan when it passed in 1993."
