Polution and slave labour in China.

Unemployment in the US.

Globalism sounds great.

Globalism is, and will continue to, happen no matter what the US does. The US needs to figure out how to make it work for the long term. Protectionism won't work. You might as well be a cooper or haberdasher trying to pass laws to keep people using barrels and hats.

People keep trying to either spin globalism as evil or good, but it's neither. It's just something that was going to happen no matter what. The US does not have a say in whether it happens. If the US doesn't figure out a way to make it work for them, then they'll be replaced by whichever country does.

The answer is not passing laws for tariffs or thinking the US can race to the bottom with low wages and manufacturing. The world desperately needs advanced technology and medicine, and the US should be focused on that, not stupidly trying to compete with literally every other single country on Earth on things any country can produce.

Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

You are also misunderstanding by conflating globalism with free trade. The two are related, but not the same. You can be for free trade of goods and services, but not for unelected central powers (i.e. an EU, a central bank).

Mainstream academic economists are typically free trade, but we have no science to test this theory so just br careful about drinking too much of the kool aid. LarGe corps, banks, and US gov generally want globalism. Keep in mind why they want that (profit and power). We still have a lot of people suffering in 2017 and no longer a good excuse for it (i.e. resources scarcity cant explain malnutrition anymore).

The EU is unelected? Member countries send their own representatives to the EU Parliament; they send council members to the European Council.

The ECB is nominated by the EC.

The U.S. Federal Reserve commissioners and chairman are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Many would consider that unelected. I'm sure you draw the line somewhere too: I doubt you consider every government employee elected just because you can draw a chain of responsibility back to some elected official.

Please don't backpedal by going into the definition of the word. The rhetorical value of "unelected" was to paint the EU and Federal Reserve as unrepresentative.

Hell, by your logic, the U.S. Senate before the 20th Century wasn't elected because they were elected by state legislatures instead of popular elections.

You are simply and flatly factually wrong about this, sorry. I encourage you to check out the textbook definition of the Fed as well as technocracy. You can also Google 'differences b/w a technocracy and democracy.' The Fed is widely accepted by every piece of academic literature Ive ever come across to be a technocracy, and that is the word we use to describe it. Also, the EU can and should be thought of at least being largely technocratic as well.

You're the only person in this thread to talk about "democracy vs technocracy," debating a point I never made.

When you were arguing about how the EU and Fed are, in your opinion, elected, I thought you would be able to make the connection. They aren't considered elected officials in the standard sense we think about it--in a democratic sense--and no one thinks that. They are unelected by any plain interpretation of democracy. That's the reason the word technocracy is used to describe them.

> Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.

It's worked pretty well here for doctors and pharma.

Globalism != Globalisation

You're grossly simplifying. According to the World Bank [1], since 1990, nearly 1.1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty.

[1] http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-p...

I hope that you're right, but it's definitely a big assumption on your part that China (and, of course, Chinese culture in general) will naturally head down the path of caring about the environment in the same sense that Western countries and cultures have started to.

There are different levels of scale at play that make very different tactics work in Shanghai vs Vancouver; in the former there's enough difficulty ensuring that all the logistics work to ensure the populace is not starving that other considerations will necessarily have to go by the wayside.

We also have to consider history and cultural forces, which have inertia, whenever we consider social change over time. The western world is becoming cleaner largely by virtue of each succeeding generation encouraging its children to take stewardship of the environment seriously. Even with this tendency, we still pollute terribly.

I'm not convinced that there is much of an environmental shift in Mainland Chinese culture presently, at the very least in the city cores; and if there is, I suspect it will be generations before it's taken as seriously as it is here, which is still insufficient to actually stop bad things - and still undereducated as to what risks are reasonable vs. simply protesting whatever has the right virtue-signalling associations in the current year.

When you say:

> As China becomes richer

...there's an implicit assumption that "becoming richer" is just a natural, unavoidable, guaranteed outcome of the modern world. This is another assumption, and one I fear would be even harder to justify than Chinese culture becoming environmentally focused in a short enough time to matter.

There's no guarantee that resource extraction at the current rate needed for wealth to outgrow population growth is a guarantee. This means there's no reason to assume that the per-capita average GDP or standard of living is going to rise forever, to the point where environmentalism (in the sense that it's often more expensive) is going to become not only feasible, but fashionable. Frugality may overcome the natural human desire to display wealthiness, if the threshold is too high for the average person.

Lastly -

While your solution may very well become the case in the long term, and again, I hope you're right because it's truly the best outcome, we still have to deal with environmental ramifications today, both of past decisions and of decision being made right now. It's probably better to stem the tide earlier rather than waiting for it to just naturally stem itself.

This might mean "environmental protectionism", in the form of heavy tariffs against goods from countries with lower environmental standards and/or poor enforcement.

What? As if west is taking environmental protectionism seriously. Look what Trump is doing and other climate change deniers. An idiot in Australian parliament walks around with a lump of coal. Canada is raping the country digging up those tar sands which is more polluting than previously thought according to last studies. China needs to catch up at any cost, but once they do their government system will allow them to take drastic measures to clean up faster than the west. Our political systems are in bed with polluters and we're still emmitting the highest levels of CO2 per capita.