Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [28]
Likewise, while it makes sense for nation-states to create incentives for exports and tariff disincentives for imports, corporate producers and individual consumers start from a very different vantage point: literally speaking, producers are universal “exporters” (they export everything they make in their factories “out”) and consumers are universal “importers” (they import from “outside” their home everything they consume); this universalism means in practice that the idea of imports and exports has little or no meaning for market players. The American textile company that moves its factory to Indonesia and, using cheaper labor, sends cheaper dresses back across the border incurs no trade deficit, only greater profitability. The American consumer who purchases that dress does not lose a job, she gains a bargain. Trade deficits belong to nation-states alone. Individual American workers may lose jobs and individual American citizens may have to deal with interest rate changes induced by their nation’s trade deficit, but American consumers and American producers, qua consumers and producers, couldn’t care less.
Of course nobody really intends to segment their being quite so schizophrenically: Americans are job holders as well as consumers, and even in the narrow terms of economic efficiency, their capacity to consume over the long haul depends on secure employment over the long term—and they know it. They are citizens no less than producers and need to consider the public space consequences of their private sector acts. Market identity is only one fractious piece of a person’s whole identity, which also contains ethnic and civic dimensions that may rival or even be inimical to market identity. The consumer who welcomes lower prices may, as an employee of a textile firm, be hostile to the export of jobs that brought prices down. The producer who profits from the circumventing of environmental regulations may regret as a citizen the damage businesses like his cause to the environment and, as a citizen, support clean air legislation injurious to his business.
Yet full employment and environmental preservation are social goods rather than private-market goods; and the proponents of McWorld view markets and their impact strictly from the one-dimensional perspective of capitalist efficiency. From this constrained, short-term perspective, citizenship, ethnicity, and job status as well as other rival forms of identity are at best irrelevant, at worst, obstacles to be overcome. People and nations may shudder at corporate downsizing policies that result in massive job elimination, but the market will celebrate its players’ new competitiveness.
Nations may have national economic policies but to the true capitalist, regulations, tariffs, bailouts, embargoes, wage restraints, employment quotas, environmentalist restrictions, and even putatively procapitalist incentives or price-fixing schemes are anathema—all equally to be disdained as statist attempts to distort a “natural” process that works properly only when left to itself. Thus the ancient war cry of old and new capitalists alike: laissez-faire! Leave us alone! Let us do what producers and consumers do: sell, buy, produce, consume.
These classical doctrines were conceived for a much simpler world and were pushed to the margins by Keynesianism and the welfare state. The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private interests and the commonweal