Listening to the bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and in other transnational organizations like the European Union, it appears that the most pressing issues about globalization is the impact upon governments' ability to collect taxes. Of course, these international civil servants incomes depend upon tax revenues raised by member countries. Their anguish is focused upon an expected round of so-called tax competition where countries engage in a competitive process of internecine tax reductions in order to attract wayward capital.

In posing the problem this way, it is obvious that they correctly see that the primary agent and effect of expanding global markets is the increased mobility of resources, especially capital.

However, there is a false presumption that such competition will involve a mutually destructive "race to the bottom" where governments and citizens alike are helpless before the might of global capital. The most likely result of competition among governments is that they will be forced to become more efficient providers of a better mix of publicly-funded goods and services. Faced with the prospects of having to downsize themselves, it is no wonder that bureaucrats are squealing like stuck pigs.