Reply #38: I don't know if we can go back, better would be to find a way forward... [View All]

[ldoolin]

would you propose to go back to old-style protectionism and nationalism?

I'm afraid it's probably too late for that, if you mean putting all the old tariffs and trade barriers back in place. And probably not an appropriate response - I'm thinking one answer lies more in a global unionization and minimum wage drive, which would be more appropriate to post-NAFTA and post-GATT conditions than bringing back old tariffs and trade barriers, which may have been appropriate pre-NAFTA.

We also have an ecological disaster in the making with all the global trade that is importing noxious weeds and insects into areas where they can wreak a lot of damage. Again, it may be too late to do anything about this. Cutting off already existing trade isn't a solution. I don't have any good solutions here.

It would have been better had NAFTA and the WTO never been implemented in the first place.

I think some kind of very limited world government, that were limited to a world court to deal with major international war crimes and human rights trials, and with a goal of eliminating wars by making the initiation of wars and military buildups themselves illegal offenses which would be prosecuted in the world court, would be a good thing in theory - BUT - I would be very wary of anything like a world court or limited world government so long as people like the Bush regime are still with us - they could very easily rig the game so that only people like Saddam Hussein and Kil Jong Il wind up being tried in world court, but never Bush, Cheney, Powell, or Blair. In other words it could give Bush or others like him even more of a free license to engage in more unilateral wars, if not implemented right. In any case such a limited world government would be a far cry from the utopian vision of some (and the nightmares of John Birchers) of a world government with countries and borders eliminated. That wouldn't be workable or possible right now, for a number of reasons.