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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 selfsufficiency: 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).
