YES! First Post!

A few day ago, my economics teacher made an interesting comment. He said, "I don't understand the fear over turning to free trade." For those of you unfamiliar with "free trade," it is the system of trade that allows anyone to exchange anything with anyone they like (no taxes, no tariffs, just pure trade). He went on to use areas such as Shanghai and Hong Kong (both areas have few resources, but incredibly high living standards) to exemplify the effects of free trade.

From this discussion, I devised the thesis that free trade is the market of Globalization. That is to say, globalization occurs at a greater extent when an economy shifts closer to the attractive prospects of free trade.

Allow me to put it into a story. Say I am the happy owner of a cow. I want to use this small amount of wealth to my benefit, so I begin testing out different governments and markets. First, I join a monarchal society. I live happily with my cow, selling its milk to pay my taxes, till one day my country goes to war, and my cow is taken from me in the name of the King. I work hard to buy a new cow, and leave the monarchal society and its regulated market for a more "people-friendly market." I therefore travel with my new cow till I reach a country under a communist regime. Here I work hard all day and all night with my cow. I plow fields and produce milk for my comrades until the government discovers my cow, takes it from me, shoots it, then brings me the hooves and tail (the rest is divided up and given to others). Unsatisfied, I leave town yet again. As I travel, I discover a stray cow that has no owner. I take it as my own, and continue on my merry way (praising God for my good fortune). Finally, I step inside the boundaries of a fascist nation. I am instantly shot, hung, drawn and quartered, and my remains burned. My cow suffers the same fate, and is then served as dinner to the lords of the land. Luckily, I am a practicing Hindu, and I am soon reincarnated as a boy in the home of a trader in a capitalist market practicing free trade. The life is fantastic! Everyone benefits, all have the opportunity to grow and expand, and the market is powered by the self-interest of all who engage in it (which is practically everybody). I immediately go back to the other nations to tell them the good news. Soon, though not everyone has totally adopted the principle yet, the world is trading, outsourcing, building factories in jungles, felling entire forests, and pumping oil out of foreign oceans. AND WE LOVE IT.

This is the world's globalization history in a nutshell. From this, it can be understood why we as a nation are moving more towards a free-trade market, which, in turn, explains our outsourcing (A principle of globalization).