Three cheers for global capitalism.(Cover Story)

Under what is rather barrenly termed "globalization"--the process by which people, information, trade, investments, democracy, and the market economy tend more and more to cross national borders--our options and opportunities have multiplied. We don't have to shop at the big local company; we can turn to a foreign competitor. We don't have to work for the village's one and only employer; we can seek alternative opportunities. We don't have to make do with local cultural amenities; the world's culture is at our disposal. Companies, politicians, and associations have to exert themselves to elicit interest from people who have a whole world of options. Our ability to control our own lives is growing, and prosperity is growing with it.

Free markets and free trade and free choices transfer power to individuals at the expense of political institutions. Because there is no central control booth, it seems unchecked, chaotic. Political theorist Benjamin Barber speaks for many critics when he bemoans the absence of "viable powers of opposing, subduing, and civilizing the anarchic forces of the global economy." "Globalization" conjures up the image of an anonymous, enigmatic, elusive force, but it is actually just the sum of billions of people in thousands of places making decentralized decisions about their own lives. No one is in the driver's seat precisely because all of us are steering.

No company would import goods from abroad if we didn't buy them. If we did not send e-mails, order books, and download music every day, the Internet would wither and die. We eat bananas from Ecuador, order magazines from Britain, work for export companies selling to Germany and Russia, vacation in Thailand, and save money for retirement by investing in South America and Asia. These things are carried out by businesses only because we as individuals want them to. Globalization takes place from the bottom up.

A recent book about the nineteenth-century Swedish historian Erik Geijer notes that he was able to keep himself up to date just by sitting in Uppsala reading the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review. That is how simple and intelligible the world can be when only a tiny elite in the capitals of Europe makes any difference to the course of world events. How much more complex and confusing everything is now, with ordinary people having a say over their own lives. Elites may mourn that they have lost power, but everyday life has vastly improved now that inexpensive goods and outside information and different employment opportunities are no longer blocked by political barriers.

To those of us in rich countries, more economic liberty to pick and choose may sound like a trivial luxury, even an annoyance--but it isn't. Fresh options are invaluable for all of us. And the existence from which globalization delivers people in the Third World--poverty, filth, ignorance, and powerlessness--really is intolerable. When global capitalism knocks at the door of Bhagant, an elderly agricultural worker and "untouchable" in the Indian village of Saijani, it leads to his house being built of brick instead of mud, to shoes on his feet, and clean clothes--not rags-on his back. Outside Bhagant's house, the streets now have drains, and the fragrance of tilled earth has replaced the stench of refuse. Thirty years ago Bhagant didn't know he was living in India. Today he watches world news on television. The stand that we in the privileged world take on the burning issue of globalization can determine whether or not more people will experience the development that has taken place in Bhagant's village.

Critics of globalization often paint a picture of capitalist marauders secretly plotting for world mastery, but this notion is completely off the mark. It has mostly been pragmatic, previously socialist, politicians who fanned globalization in China, Latin America, and East Asia--after realizing that government control freakery had ruined their societies. Any allegation of runaway capitalism has to be tempered by the observation that today we have the largest public sectors and highest taxes the world has ever known. The economic liberalization measures of the last quarter century may have abolished some of the recent past's centralist excesses, but they have hardly ushered in a system of laissez-faire.

What defenders of global capitalism believe in, first and foremost, is man's capacity for achieving great things by means of the combined force of market exchanges. It is not their intention to put a price tag on everything. The important things--love, family, friendship, one's own way of life--cannot be assigned a monetary value. Principled advocates of global economic liberty plead for a more open world because that setting unleashes individual creativity as none other can. At its core, the belief in capitalist freedom among nations is a belief in mankind.