In Ha-Joon Chang’s book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, he argues correctly:
The wage gaps between rich and poor countries exist not mainly because of differences in individual productivity but mainly because of immigration control. If there were free migration, most workers in rich countries could be, and would be, replaced by workers from poor countries.
Of course, hypothetically, there would eventually be greater global income equality. This had never really occurred to me before, and I was struck at the irony that the typical anti-immigration types are also the hard-core ‘free’ marketers as well. Of course, I don’t think this means we need immediate abolishment of immigration restrictions. But rather, I think it calls for a softer stance on regulations in general. One ought not to support regulations that only benefit one’s own desires and that protect one’s own resources. That seems anti-free market. What do you think?
Ah, osmosis. Stuff of all sorts flows from regions of high concentration to regions of low concentration — but only across permeable borders, and only between regions that are in direct contact.
Ideally, the end result of globalization would be to place every region in reasonably direct contact with every other, and to make the borders permeable. But osmosis isn’t a free market; it isn’t a market at all. It is simply a mechanism by which nature dynamically redistributes inequalities. It is a leveling mechanism. And it is slow.
A market is a mechanism for controlled, interested exchange of inequalities. “Free” is a term of self-interest: we don’t want to be locked out of someone else’s exchange of inequalities. But we don’t want our own to be redistributed, either — it would take away our market value.