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The Presidential election is moving out of the primary phase and beginning to heat up. As it does the state of the American economy is a prime talking point, and many of the frustrated points of view being expressed touch on the impact of globalization on our economy. While plenty that rhetoric is negative, the negativity seems hypocritical. We seem given to criticizing globalization on one hand while sourcing all kinds of services, such as web hosting, from international companies that provide the services at a discount.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for globalization. The supremacy of the West in the global economy is a quirk of history, the result of the Anglo-French rivalry that led to the creation of powerful navies and to a subsequent naval arms race throughout Europe. That gave Europe overwhelming sea power, which was the key to international conquest and expansion during the 18th and 19th centuries. That expansion established inequitable international relationships that have been hurting everybody ever since.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s time the unfair hegemony of European and North American powers came to an end. That hegemony, and the balance of power that depends upon it, is inherently unethical because it derives from the false idea that an American or European person, by virtue of the nation of his birth, is innately more valuable than a person born in another nation, with a different race and citizenship.

That is, however, a separate issue. The nature of a nation does bind citizens to one another within a collective, which has an organizational structure and boundaries. Because I am an American, I have a special bond with, and obligation to, other Americans. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I consider them more valuable. It means that I respect a duty to my fellow citizens which I do not have to a citizen of Canada or Nepal. That is to say, we take care of each other. If that is true, it follows that we should foster the national economy, in which we are all participants.

The federal government does have means at its disposal to protect our economy more from international competition without unethically jeopardizing the lives of citizens of other countries. We could impede the technology transfer to China and India, for example. We could consider policies that would make American manufacturing more competitive with manufacturing in other parts of the world.

However, there are only two ways for the government to increase American competitiveness. First, the Commerce Department could impose tariffs to raise the price of goods produced outside the United States, but those could very easily lead to trade wars and heightened tension. The other is to lower environmental standards and labor requirements, allowing American companies to behave with the same disregard for the health of their workers and the world that international manufacturers do. Doing that would be disastrous.

On the other hand, individual people and companies have total control over how they spend their money, and if we weren’t so overwhelmingly obsessed with low prices we would probably do a much better job of taking care of our own economically. However, because we are obsessed with low prices, we tend to buy the cheapest item, which is almost always produced internationally in order to save money. The government isn’t responsible for that behavior. That’s on us.

That’s what I think about any time I hear someone ranting and raving about how the government is failing the American economy. As long as we insist on buying cheap stuff that’s manufactured overseas rather than paying a decent price for American goods, and as long as we opt for cheap offshore web hosting instead of putting our website on a local ISP, the government isn’t responsible for our economic decline.