There was a time when the negative effects of destructively imbalanced trade were felt more strongly in the Third World than among the more advanced societies.  Perhaps as a consequence, we in the West haven’t paid too much attention to them.

But today, as globalized trade shifts more and more production to countries with an "optimal" production-efficiency mix of low wages and high skills, the situation is turning against the First World.  We have begun to see whole industries vanish, and cities shrivel.

Can we do anything more about this situation than talk up the as-yet unproven long-term superiority of a service economy, or an information-based one, to "old smokestack industries?"  Even more to the point, if such a "new" economy should prove unable in actual practice to take up the slack left by a disintegrating "old-style" economy, is there anything we can do besides watch helplessly until the situation "corrects" itself by bringing American workers’ wages down to the level of the most exploited of the Third World’s?

We may have a better option, if we can grasp the value of our markets to other economies.

After all, without our strong markets to sell to, many of the more dynamic economies would go into tailspins.  Why can’t we treat our markets as the vital shared resources that they are—and begin to cultivate and replenish them more prudently, the same way we are learning to do with things like timber and agricultural land?

To begin to nurture the resource of our markets, the most fundamental principle we would need to confront is that we don’t constitute much of a market if we don’t have jobs.  This suggests that perhaps what we really ought to do is just require anyone who takes a given amount of money out of our economy in the form of product sales to "reseed" the market by providing an appropriately counterbalancing amount of jobs—whether by hiring our citizens directly, or by contracting with indigenous companies that do.

It probably doesn’t much matter to the health of our markets who provides these jobs.  They could be domestic, or they could be foreign. 

If we were to adopt such a policy, our economy could be truly global and open and fair, in all the best senses of the free-traders.  We would have the "cleansing gales of competition" that many contemporary observers say are necessary and healthy.  But instead of limiting the effects of competition to hapless employees who can do little to change corporate strategy, the gales would blow most strongly in the executive suite—where they would be more likely to uproot those who have failed, in a truly strategic sense, to keep their companies properly productive.