This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 27th, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown. Globalization has taken some hits in the last few years

and the recognition that the free flow of capital and people to where

they can be most productive for themselves is decidedly on the wane.

Cato's Joe and Norberg says the once solid consensus on the importance of openness is worth fighting to regain.

When I think about the case that is presented against globalization broadly, I guess what I think about in modern times I can remember that

you know the big fights over it in the 90s amid trade agreements the rise of China

as an industrial power and that sort of thing, it seems like today,

at least within the United States, what we're seeing is a lot of protections that have built up over decades, almost like, you know,

cruft that has developed on our institutions, it seems almost anathema to people like Joe Biden, to Congress, to think, well, maybe if we got rid of some of this stuff, a lot of these institutions

that were constantly demonizing would actually function better.

Yes, there's an unfortunate tendency for these tariffs and trade barriers and

other things to build up over time and build their own constituency who defend them.

It's easy to implement, it's much more difficult to get out of it.

And now unfortunately it seems like both the left and the new right have sort of rediscovered

their inner economic illiteracy and combined old ideas about protectionism with new environmental concerns when it comes to the

Democrats. We should heavily subsidize domestic production of certain green technologies and with the national

Conservatives this idea that globalization has somehow failed the working class

has been combined with new security concerns,

geopolitical concerns, the rivalry with China.

So there's this perfect storm where all these different arguments

are then combined with certain groups have a very real

...