Business Ethics and Globalization

Business Ethics and Globalization

Ethical issues mean issues whether something is right or wrong, moral or immoral. Globalization means the tendency of people to trade goods and services, or to migrate, across national borders as that the whole globe forms one economy.

First we need to understand that the reason we modern humans live so differently to our ancestors who lived for many ages as poor as animals, is because of people exchanging more and more goods and services with each other. Instead of each person producing his own food, shelter, sandals, shirt and so on; and instead of only co-operating with one's near family or village, today's people exchange goods and services with strangers across the world. This enables each person to specialize in one small part of the total effort of human society, and enables each person to enjoy a much greater share than in the absence of such trade. Anything that restricts such trade makes the whole world poorer; and governments restrict such trade in thousands of way.

1. Nation-states exclude people from outside the state from using the natural resources within those states. How can this be justified? It can be justified if everyone else can get the benefit of those natural resources by freedom of trade between the people of different nation-states. But "if goods don't cross borders, armies will." The modern environmental movement locks up huge tracts of land in the most productive countries so that well-fed worriers can feel good about the world in a thousand years' time. Should the people of China, India or Indonesia starve en masse so that selfish westerners in the USA and Australia can sterilize large areas of land, under environmental policies that regard human beings as noxious pests?

2. Government control of the money supply functions to take money from everyone in the population and give it to politicians, rich bankers, big corporations, and groups that politicians want to bribe for votes. Government control of money supply causes economic depressions, and widespread bankruptcy and unemployment. The governments of the world are now conspiring to set up an international paper currency, which will rob the poorest people in the world to benefit the richest. How can this be justified? Government monopoly control of the money supply should be abolished.

3. Governments take billions of dollars from the populations of the western world, and give it to the richest members of military dictatorships and crackpot tyrannies in the third world, under the name of 'foreign aid'. Since both the taxpayers of the western world, and the poor of the third world, would be better off if the money was left in the hands of the taxpayers to buy things from the third world, how can this legal thievery be justified?

Resources

www.mises.org