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Silicon Valley Bosses Are Globalists, Not Libertarians (economist.com)
From a report via The Economist: In a recently published survey of 600 entrepreneurs and executives in Silicon Valley, conducted by David Broockman and Neil Malhotra of Stanford University and Gregory Ferenstein, a journalist, three-quarters of respondents said they supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. But although technology-firm leaders hold views that in general hew much closer to Democratic positions than Republican ones, they are far from reliable partisan ideologues. As you might expect from captains of industry, Silicon Valley executives are much more likely to support free trade and to oppose government regulation of businesses than your average Democrat is. For example, just 30% of tech bosses believe that ride-hailing companies need to be regulated like the taxi industry, compared with 60% of Democrats.
Given their combination of socially liberal attitudes and a preference for free markets, you might call Silicon Valley executives libertarians. However, libertarians generally advocate shrinking the state as a share of the economy, which technology bosses resolutely do not. When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could," just 24% agreed. In contrast, 68% of Republican donors concurred with that statement. Moreover, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are just as likely to favor redistributive economic policies, such as universal health care and higher taxes on the rich, as an average Democrat is. The outlook of our new robot-building overlords is far more communitarian than, say, the doctrines of Ayn Rand.
Given their combination of socially liberal attitudes and a preference for free markets, you might call Silicon Valley executives libertarians. However, libertarians generally advocate shrinking the state as a share of the economy, which technology bosses resolutely do not. When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could," just 24% agreed. In contrast, 68% of Republican donors concurred with that statement. Moreover, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are just as likely to favor redistributive economic policies, such as universal health care and higher taxes on the rich, as an average Democrat is. The outlook of our new robot-building overlords is far more communitarian than, say, the doctrines of Ayn Rand.
Cognitive dissonance much? Who do you think started global trade and marketed it for everybody as the way forward, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Hint: it's not the Chinese.
It's rather hilarious to see the West panic about this now. Globalization has been going on since the age of sail, and has thus far only benefited the advanced economies. The massive fortunes of the US and Europe rest on the foundations of global trade and extracting resources (both human and raw materials) from underdeveloped economies at ridiculously cheap prices.
But now that the benefits of global trade start to affect Asia and Africa moreso than the west, now this thing that has brought the west its current fortunes is suddenly a thing of the devil and we must all somehow magically revert back to 1500s mercantilism where each nation somehow cuts itself of from the global networks of trade and logistics and start producing everything by and for itself, which is an absurd idea.
First we (=the west, not just the US) go around telling everyone how great this global marketplace really is, and how everyone really should start to do business with us because it's for the good of everyone, and then a few decades pass and we start to blame these countries for doing exactly what we told them to do and from which we've also ourselves benefited,
This is the economy at work: people want lower prices but also high pay, you can't have both if you only manufacture domestically unless you automate, in which case the prices stay low but you won't get a lot of jobs.
The fact of the matter is that full-time employment will cease to be the norm within this century for most westerners. You can be in denial about it, but you can't stop the technological progress that's taking us there. Machines will simply become more efficient at doing most jobs than humans, so if you want to maintain your domestic demand and make sure people sustain their standard of living, I suggest you get out of the cold war mindset and start doing some reading about the socialism (hint nr. 2: free market and socialism are not incompatible, we've had both in northern/western Europe for long) that you so dread and concepts like basic income, because the solutions to the problems caused by the market itself acting as it should cannot be solved by the market.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
You can definitely be a libertarian and a globalist at the same time. In fact the two are compatible. The dangerous philosophies are the authoritarian systems such as nationalism and socialism. They block people from interacting with and trading with each other based on what an authority think is best!
Don't forget that "globalist" is normally used by neo-Nazis to mean "Jew." These codewords go back a long way, to before our involvement in WWII. If somebody is "globalist" they don't have the nation's interest as priority #1. That makes them not True Americans (TM), which is nearly indistinguishable from inhuman beasts. That's one of the reasons the KKK used "America First" as a slogan. The notion of Jews (and Catholics) being beholden to not-America (Israel, the Vatican), was easy to latch onto.
Nationalism does tend to be authoritarian, but modern socialism doesn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The standard of living in those countries is well above that in the US. With better educational systems, better health care, more affordable housing, more security in retirement, etc. Sure there are small pockets of the US with higher standards of living, but when you look at the US as a whole then things start to decline. It would be interesting to see US standard of living index going state by state though.
https://www.numbeo.com/quality...