Seite 39 [39]
What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 37
goods produced with varying levels of efficiency. Rather, on one side
are information and money that can be marketed anywhere for great
profit, while on the other are the owners of “local capacities”, who are
able to maintain their competitiveness only by pushing down their costs.
The surest way of keeping costs down is to not pay them or to make
others pay them: the costs of the pollution of the environment, the direct
and indirect costs of the exhaustion of natural resources, the costs of
the restoration of education and work capacity and employees’ cost of
living. Classical economics could also not have reckoned with the mass
migration of the workforce from their homeland to countries promising
a higher wage. And thus regions struggling with depopulation and
natural disasters evolve on the periphery, while the centre struggles with
the difficulties of overpopulation and the integration of the newcomers.
It is not possible to exit the competition, however, because in the
meantime the “developing” countries have completely lost their self¬
sufficiency: their national income and subsistence depend increasingly
on the sectors integrated into the multinational, export-driven network.
As for the “developed”, they would not survive a minute without the
food, raw materials and utility items.
Not without reason do the critics of the system of free trade appeal
to John Maynard Keynes, who, in an article that appeared in 1933,
presented the most apt summary of what could be the credo of a green
economic policy: “It is my central contention that there is no prospect
for the next generation of a uniformity of economic system throughout
the world, such as existed, broadly speaking, during the nineteenth
century, that we all need to be as free as possible of interference from economic
changes elsewhere, in order to make our own favorite experiments towards the
ideal social republic of the future, and that a deliberate movement towards
greater national self-sufficiency and economic isolation will make our
task easier, in so far as it can be accomplished without excessive economic
cost. I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather
than with those who would maximize economic entanglement among
nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel — these are the things
which should of their nature be international. But let goods to be
homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and above
all, let finance be primarily national.”’’ Keynes’ expectation was not
fulfilled. What happened was exactly the opposite of what he held
desirable. The consequences, however, fully justify his prophetic words.
13 John Maynard Keynes: National Self-Sufficiency. The Yale Review 22.4. (June 1933).