This happens everywhere… Americans say: “Buy American”… I dont know about the Dutch, but I’m sure they say something similar. In the end, This has little effect. People will still buy samsung. As Americans buys toyotas or whatever.

Geoff,

Instead of saying “stupidities”, you could enlighten us about the benefits of Globalisation.

1) Attempts by the state to legislate people into buying from the local market are incredibly stupid. Protectionism in Catalonia in the nineteenth century led to the bourgeoisie getting rich, their businesses getting inefficient, and consumers getting a lousy deal. When they were eventually forced to compete in open markets post-Cuba they failed and society exploded.

2) Campaigns to persuade people to include the distance travelled by products in their purchase decisions are cool in principal but rarely work. International collaboration on stuff like kerosene taxation could make this happen, but it looks pretty unlikely at the moment.

3) Campaigns to boycott companies if they leave just make it more unlikely that anyone will want to come here to provide new jobs.

If we can’t make cars or lightbulbs better and cheaper than the Chinese or the Slovaks, we either need to find a way of doing so or get out of those markets. I think it’s a demonstration of how bad CiU industrial policy was (and I’m not saying Madrid did much better) that this all seems to have come as such a big surprise.