When globalization is looked at as a force that creates a tide of incentives against the artificial levies of national borders, it indeed becomes very much like gravity. Trade, capital flows, and most notably labor flows constantly shift to meet new opportunities and press against old-world barriers. Goods are smuggled to avoid taxes, quotas, or prohibition; money is cleverly managed and maneuvered to also avoid taxes, as well as investment restrictions; millions of illegal immigrants pour across borders each year, eluding patrols and immigration bureaucrats, to work for what seem like pittances. The fact of the matter is that the gains to be realized from international trade, investment, and migration are so great that people pay the costs of overcoming massive edifices of coercive economic protection (on both sides of a border).

What is it about this strange phenomenon of international economics that is so great? It is nothing special or strange at all. It’s just regular economics. Globalization is not a special kind of economic, political, or social system (unless what is meant by the term is one global government); it is, ultimately, the economic recognition of the essential similarity of human beings. Concepts such as nation, race, and religion have long dominated geographically localized societies’ dealings with others. One set of rules applied to those in the group, and another set applied to those outside. The modern manifestation of government has simply formalized and enforced those rules: only some manners of economic exchange are permissible with those persons who lie outside our geographic border. The only differences between economic exchanges within the group and between groups are caused by issues that arise solely when there is a concept of “group.”

Whether Kofi Annan meant the analogy to be as deep or not, globalization is very much like gravity. The “laws” of globalization, like the laws of gravity, apply universally. Other things equal, if a rock falls on Tuesday, it must also fall on Friday; if a 500g steel mass falls, then a 600g mass must also fall; and so forth. In the case of globalization, if greater competition between local producers drives down prices, greater competition between local producers and foreign producers must also drive down prices. If firms benefit from an increase in the labor supply of American citizens, firms must benefit from an increase in the labor supply from equally-skilled immigrants. Goods, capital, and labor do not suddenly have a radical change in their nature because they have been stamped with a nation’s name.

Globalization merely represents the logical extension of economic principles beyond national borders, like gravity is a logical extension of the broader phenomena of physics. Ignoring all the government intervention that makes it so (taxes, tariffs, export/import restrictions, etc.), to argue that trade between the U.S. and Canada is intrinsically different from trade within the U.S. is like arguing that a rock in Canada falls differently than one in the U.S. To confirm this hypothesis, one need only examine any case in which a border has become irrelevant with relation to an economic transaction. Prior to their unification under the U.S. Constitution, the former American colonies were able to place tariffs on goods coming from other colonies. The U.S. Constitution, however, established a free trade zone between the states (under the commerce clause). Today, nothing seems foreign about a woman in Georgia buying oranges from a man in Florida. There is no talk of protecting Nebraska corn producers from Wisconsin corn producers. Yet on the international level, we must be concerned with purchasing goods from other human beings (who are to be economically categorized differently) and maintaining our producers in a particular industry against theirs.

The idea of international trade above and beyond “trade with typically higher transport costs” is only supported by national mythology and by government economic policies that isolate markets from each other. For all intents and purposes a transaction between someone in Washington and someone in British Columbia is more culturally similar and much cheaper in terms of transportation than someone in Florida buying from Wisconsin, but there is always that supposedly fundamental difference: one’s international trade, the other is a domestic purchase. If Canada became a part of the U.S. tomorrow, though, the first transaction would become a domestic purchase with virtually the flip of a switch. What this example illustrates is that the only thing that makes globalization different from regular economics are the barriers we erect between economies, much like the only thing that makes gravity cease to make an object move is an application of force against it. The treatment of “domestic economics” as a phenomenon separate from “international economics” is, ultimately, like discriminating between “gravity acting upon an object” and “gravity acting upon an object with something in the way.”

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