I am looking at the current Trans Pacific Partnership with increasing skepticism. Because I don’t trust the other polities. I do think free trade can work within an empire, but that is within an empire, where there is peace, enforced at a cost. The paradigm here is the British Imperial system that had confidence that they could take on Germany, Italy and Austria alone and win because even if England and Scotland were lost Britian would still exist in the empire. Within the empire there was certainty, without chaos.

The TransPacific Partnership was a Late Imperial Project set up by NZ and Australia, who generally have no tarrifs, and practice free trade. Because both are hard to invade due geography. The Americans are trying to make it a late imperial project, without acknowledging that there is a cost to empire.

The British, Russians and Chinese know this. Painfully. For their empires were built on the blood of their armies and navies, for good or ill.

The strongest argument that I can think of to roll back globalization is that, while in theory peaceful world trade is desirable, in practice, it requires an enormous empire, centralized international banking, and an inane tangle of foreign policy relationships to maintain for a large country like the US.

Libertarians will often argue that trade with China is enormously positive while simultaneously arguing that the United States should pull back from its foreign military bases and dismantle its blue water Navy. That same military-industrial complex is what pressures China to continue to trade with the US and accept American paper in return for tangible goods.

While it may be true — ignoring the costs of maintaining that quiet empire — that trade is positive — it’s stupid to ignore those costs, or to decry those costs as morally wrong, while praising the benefits.

It also assumes that peace is permanent, whereas history tells us that war — and continually swapping allegiances — is what’s normal in international relations. Formulating policies based on the assumption that world peace will be permanent is incredibly stupid.

You need imperial reach to export your jobs, to places where you care not about the workers, nor the environment, nor the despair unemployment causes what used to be called the working class. Which used to have dignity.

It’s taken as a given among educated Westerners that Western nations are ‘post-industrial economies’ — meaning that employment in industry as a proportion of the population has declined and will decline for the foreseeable future, and that they will be replaced by jobs in information technology (meaning anything involved with a computer) and in stuff like cleaning up hotel rooms.

This isn’t actually entirely accurate. What’s happened since the 1970s (setting aside the monetary issue) is that the industrial economy was made mostly illegal in the United States and Europe. A combination of labor and environmental regulation intended to improve quality of life made it so that, effectively, the government legislated entire sectors out of existence. At the same time, much of this economic activity was pushed overseas.

In this way, Apple can portray itself as a ‘post-industrial’ company, even when its hardware manufacture supply chain is absolutely enormous. The most efficient structure for them is to keep manufacturing overseas, and much of the retail, design, and software engineering in the United States.

Since the democratic political culture seeks to be comforted and to avoid pain, the often difficult & dirty existence of a factory worker was deemed to be insulting to human dignity, so it had to be pushed on to foreign shores. Putting people on welfare rolls who might otherwise be working on an assembly line at least comforts Americans that they will never find themselves working in a factory no matter how poorly suited to other forms of work they might be.

This shift also tends to be portrayed as a directed form of history — labor agitation ended ‘abusive’ labor practices (in reality it just shifted the ‘abusive’ practices overseas), universal education granted everyone more opportunities, and now no one needs to work in a grimy factory for 16 hours a day, except that plenty of people still do in order to manufacture the same products, just that much of it happens in other countries rather than domestically.

I may be too old for this world, or too ornery. I don’t buy this. I recall working as a teenager in freezing works (Meat Packers) and that there was heavy industry in Dunedin and Otahuhu — I live in one town and grew up in the other. An industrial infrastructure may be inefficient, but it is antifragile. At present our economy — even in NZ — relies in designing things in NZ and then making them elsewhere: our outdoors clothing (with the exception of Cactus Climbing) is made in China, our best washing machines are made in Malaysia and Mexico. It is only the very high tech things — Perreaux amplifiers, Fisher and Paykel humdifiers (used in anaesthetic circuits) are made in NZ, where the quality requriements are much higher.

But this relies on China being peaceful: that the Middle Kingdom consider the Red Dynasty has the mantle of Heaven. Which is not the way to bet.

It relies on piracy being a non viable profession.

It relies on peace.

All of this is fragile. Free trade, like all legal innovations, relies on that most fickle of human emotions, goodwill. An empire runs on blood and iron. It is less fragile, indeed it can thrive on chaos. And as the Free Trade period ends, expect more imperial systems, either overt or corporate. Run by people who know that an imperium comes with a cost to your honour and casualties on your side.