Under Duress

Globalization is true just as gravity is true. To pretend we can stop it at our borders is to invent the anti-gravity machine.

Sorry John Edwards, sorry Mike Huckabee, sorry populists and protectionists of all stripes.

Sorry every person who dropped out of high school, you will be outworked by a immigrant laborer who doesn't want LeBron's new sneakers or an SUV with a bumping stereo, and is happy to have money left over to send home.

Sorry French engineer who wants July and August for vacation. My friend from Pakistan will design the same injection-molded part, email the drawings to a fabricator in China, who will ship the part to the assembly line in Thailand which makes the product that is then sold to the French kids you are trying to raise.

Sorry American radiologist, your X-rays are being reviewed by any one of the thousands of competent Indian doctors via an internet connection, who are making diagnoses from half a world away while we sleep.

Citius, Altius, Fortius. If we want to earn our standard of living, we each need to be that much more productive than the people we are competing against. Simply showing up in the American economy is no longer enough. Each of us must earn our standard of living competing in a global marketplace.

The cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine highlights the changing landscape of power in the world, predicting a tri-polar world in which the United States, the European Union, and China compete for the hearts, minds, natural resources, and pocketbooks of the world. How do we compete with a billion Chinese who don't abide by the same environmental standards? How do we compete with an ever expanding Europe located so much closer the the key battlegrounds of the new global order? Citius, Altius, Fortius. Each of us.

Now we must point out that for all China's advantages, it does suffer from domestic discontent and a health crisis in the making (from all the pollution). Old Europe too, has its problems, namely over-regulation and the resulting high unemployment. But we cannot take on a sense of entitlement and hope to find ourselves ahead in the global economy.