vanishing ideal. With the ‘mortgage meltdown’, it may happen even faster. Prior to mortgage securitization, and global dispersion, the American real estate market has long been a shared experience.
Yet, globalization is slowing, having fostered trading blocs now ranged against it, because civilizational conflicts signal a trend, perhaps temporary, away from open markets.
With the new global crisis, increased fragility, present from the beginning, of globalized institutions with ‘superinfrastructure’, has also become apparent, and perhaps is one of the best arguments against continuing on this path.
Talk of a new Cold War has shown the notion of ‘Cobdenism,’ (the other aspect of Cobdenism) trade-concessing one’s way to peace, to have been naïve, and economically and militarily catastrophophic.
The best recent analogy to this Cobdenism was the territorial appeasement prior to World War II.
Trading blocs and unions now stand opposed not only to the American laissez faire trade regime and the multinationals which fostered them, but to fundamentalist exclusionist civilizations, in a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Yet, the property rights solution to urban redevelopment problems has been to leave it to so-called free trade.
That was the property rights ‘solution’ a generation ago for zoning, just as it was, following Adam Smith over 200 years ago, the Crown’s solution for the rise of competition from great power enemies, competitors, and colonies.
No comments:
Post a Comment