Globalization and the Death of Democracy

A debate on a local (Canadian) housing blog has arisen over the question of whether it is reasonable to protect a local real estate market from price inflation due to foreign investors.

Some repudiate the idea of regulation on the grounds that "we live in a global economy." Others have objected on the ground that not all markets are regulated to maximize the welfare of Canadians, e.g., the textile industry which has been largely off-shored, and therefore it is naive to propose regulation of the real estate market.

However, there's nothing naive about regulating markets in the interests of your own community, which is what democracy is supposed to be about.

Of course, what the globalists want is to neuter the democratic system and run things by way of global institutions subject to the hidden hand of the banking/corporate/plutocratic elite.

Textile factory pollution: Most fresh water in China is unfit to 
drink or bathe in. 

Then we’ll have completely unrestricted movement of people and goods from low wage jurisdictions to high wage jurisdictions, while capital, technology, and manufacturing is moved to the lowest-wage and least-environmentally-regulated jurisdictions.

And after all, it daft assembling cars or writing software in Canada when there are people in China, Vietnam, India, etc. who will gladly do the work at half the price, a quarter of the price, maybe a tenth the price. Equally, why put up with the cost of environmental protection and workplace health and safety when entrepreneurs and government regulators abroad are happy enough to poison rivers and wells with industrial wastes, and install anti-suicide nets for troubled workers inclined to jump off the factory roof.

Profits, naturally, will be taken by the global corporations in the lowest tax jurisdictions.

The net result of unlimited globalization would be good for people in the Third World, especially people in those poverty stricken places with a fertility rate two or three times the replacement rate. They’d be coming to Canada in considerable numbers.

However, globalization is demonstrably bad for most people in the West who will see wages crushed. For example, how many New Delhi pedicab drivers earning a dollar or two a day would refuse a job at $20 plus an hour driving a bus in Victoria or Vancouver? Or even at $10 an hour or $5, or wherever the rate would settle under Justin Trudeau’s plan for Canada as a post-national sanctuary state.

And, needless to say, when the rights and freedoms of very rich people are guaranteed everywhere equally, they will acquire the best real estate wherever it is to be found, whether in Victoria or Vancouver, BC, or in London, Los Angeles or Lucerne.

Globalization is great for the capitalist class, including pensioners living on income derived from investment, who benefit when corporations raise profits by driving down wages through global wage arbitrage and labor migration. That is why the rich loathe democracy, and look forward to the replacement of their own working class compatriots by people from elsewhere who work for less and have no stupid ideas about democracy, rule of law and other liberal clap-trap.. 

Globalization has not only lowered Western living standards, created high if hidden unemployment, and increased the death rate, but it has resulted in a process leading to the destruction of the European nations through a combination of suppressed reproduction and mass replacement immigration: a program of genocide, that is.

Globalization means the death of democracy and with it the inventors of mass democracy, the Western nations.