If we want to create healthy economies that protect rather than destroy local ecosystems, we will need to rewrite international trade rules in ways that include the social and ecological costs of production and consumptions, as well as trade. We need to protect local economies from ‘cheap’ imports made possible by hidden subsidies, externalising true costs, and outsourcing production (exploiting international inequality).
Re-localising and re-regionalising economics — while maintaining international collaboration and fair trade — creates jobs and community resilience. Re-localisation can support an economics of care — for people and place — that synergistically leads to positive social and ecological impact.
Neoclassical economic dogma would call this ‘protectionism’ and oppose it because ‘we need deregulation instead of regulation to ensure the free-market’. What a pervasive myth this so-called “free-market” is proving to be! In a conditioned knee-jerk response, many intelligent people will defend an ideal — the free market — that simply does not exist and never has.
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