Zillionaire Paul Allen was famous for spending billions in the local economy. He transformed Seattle. He's passed away, and his projects are being sold off and closed down.

> the state allows companies to leave

If you have to build a wall around your state to keep people from fleeing, you have failed.

No, if you are moving a high levels of capital and can exploit populations that haven't moved as fast as you (Mexico <- causal <- rust belt, etc) you are essentially playing a shell game but have fast hands because you can move more efficiently across larger sections of the globe and local demographics than someone from that population. It's predatory, and ultimately leads to "deserts" where the parasite has booked it to a location where the resource pipeline is more efficient thus more profits can be siphoned without a drop in metrics.

Building factories in Mexico is not exploitation - it raises the standard of living of the people who decide that working at those factories is better than what they had otherwise.

> If you have to build a wall around your state to keep people from fleeing

It's not really about building a wall around your country to keep people from fleeing, but to prevent gadgets sold by people leveraging arbitrage in an unfair way to get in – or, as we call them for now millenia, tariffs.

Arbitrage is a major reason why free market companies prosper. It's taking advantage of the Law of Comparative Advantage.

For example, consider Bob and Fred. Bob is good at hunting, but stinks at growing blueberries. Fred grows luscious blueberries, but he's likely to blow his own foot off when hunting.

Bob brings home twice the meat he needs, and Fred grows twice the blueberries he needs, and they trade.

They are both better off than if Bob and Fred each only fended for themselves.

BTW, back in the 80s, my (British) partner at Zortech noticed that boxed software in Britain sold for twice as much as the same box in the US. So he would order large quantities of boxes from the US, mark them up, and sell them locally at a nice profit.

Eventually, other businessmen caught on and this no longer worked.

That's arbitrage in action. It benefits consumers.

> It benefits consumers.

On the short term and reasonable spatial scale; sure. What's currently happening in the West is that common people are discovering that on the long term and at world scale, it does not really benefits them for a myriad of reasons, among which unevenly applied norms, difference in regimes, different social models, etc.

The world has never been more prosperous on a global scale.