Comic Economics

In today’s “free market,” capital and goods flow freely between countries. But, due mostly to immigration laws, labor does not. We (and by we I mean all of the global community: you, me, the President, and you’re gran’s friend Lola) are allowing this supposedly free market to perpetuate and thereby create much of the poverty and inequality that exists today. How can you, moreover how can Lola -- an innocent, besides her history of sexual deviancy -- be allowing this to happen?

For starters we allow this to happen because no policy maker, no business man, and no other leader in the Western world would ever in their right mind say that immigration laws should be abolished. Few would even argue that they should be loosened. But if we understand that all the capital and goods find its way into the center where the greatest profits are to be made (the Western world), the periphery (or global South) is left not only without goods or capital, but also without the means to obtain them. Increasingly outsourcing is globalizing labor, but without the ability to move freely from state to state, labor can never truly be globalized. As half the world accumulates the earth’s wealth, the other half will have an increasingly difficult time getting any of it back.

As an example I have drawn a comic economic strip where two aliens land on a planet and the inability of one to immigrate prevents him from living life to the fullest, and potentially even from surviving.