When free trade is just an illusion

When economics is a matter of scale corporations leave nations like Australia eating their dust. The massive subsidies paid for by ordinary citizens are the discounts that attract corporate investment. That fails to be spread equally across the world. America offers so much more honey to the multinational corporate hive. If rich in resources third-world citizens in poor nations pay the highest prices to attract investors to extract their resources and potential.

“We’re already moving people and capital to the US and delaying investments in Australia, and it’s not just us, it’s now most of the resources companies,” he tells me. “Australia has its own comparative advantages, but can’t outmatch the scale of the US subsidies.”

The US incentives program, mostly contained in its so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), “is the biggest piece of peacetime industrial policy we have seen in the democratic world.”

Source: Federal Budget 2023: The US is stealing Australia’s ‘core’. Gym Chalmers needs the energy to stop it