Moving Toward a Geopolitical Marketplace
By Jay Ogilvy
This column frames a question to which I do not have the answer. Or think of it as a historical agenda: How can we bring the logic of free market exchange into the domain of geopolitical conflict?
Why would we want to do such a thing? It's not simply a matter of substituting gold for guns, or nonviolent exchange for violent exchange. The question I am posing is not based on some utopian hope for perpetual peace. The distinction I want to focus on is the difference between zero-sum conflict and positive-sum exchange.
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The Zero-Sum Nature of Landmasses
With rare exceptions like landfill extensions or China's artificial islands in the South China Sea, the quantity of land on this Earth is fixed. Whatever territory one country gains, another must lose; any exchanges are thus zero sum. This is not so in the marketplace. The butcher comes to market to sell meat and buy bread, voluntarily. The baker comes to market to sell bread and buy meat, voluntarily. Both are beneficiaries of the voluntary exchange. Both return home better off than when they left home; theirs was a positive-sum exchange.
This mutually beneficial interaction in the marketplace was not always so. When bands of hunter-gatherers strayed into one another's territory, there was a decent chance they would come to blows over limited prey. What one band killed and ate, another could not. Later in our evolution, some people satisfied their needs by enslaving others and coercing their labor.
Eventually, by fits and starts, we learned how to trade both labor and goods ...
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