On the capital-markets front, it may prove difficult to maintain Toronto’s position as a premier mining-finance centre, but Houston remains the global centre of many oil-sector-related industries even though the bulk of Texas oil ran out long ago. Given our ability to control oil and gas royalty levels, I’m not overly worried about the foreign acquisition of our Canadian energy producers. Do I like it? No. But it isn’t at the top of my list of concerns.

With respect to charging Americans more than Canadians for oil and gas, these products trade at prices based on the global value of a barrel of benchmark crude, adjusted for refinery margins that differ based on localized supply-and-demand conditions. We could have Canadians pay less by giving them a government-subsidized discount from globally influenced levels, I suppose, but this would promote a greater use of fossil fuels, give the greatest net subsidy to those driving the biggest vehicles and ultimately the cost of the subsidy would displace spending on education and health care. I don’t see the upside there.

KA: Isn’t a high degree of economic and cultural sovereignty preserved for EU members because there are so many economies of roughly equal size (and because decision-making is by consensus, the oft-ridiculed Brussels “talk shop”)? You seem to be arguing that there is little choice: go global or go home . . . and eventually rot.

RM: It would be news, I believe, to most Europeans that they have maintained a “high degree of economic and cultural sovereignty” following the creation of the EU. Culture, yes, in part because culture changes slowly; economic sovereignty, no. That said, the size distribution, not unlike the size distribution of the fifty American states, does make for a more balanced system than Canada versus the US giant.

In the modern economy, the price to pay for economic isolationism is huge. What isolationist economy in the last sixty years has performed anything but miserably? I can’t think of one. And it has been thus for a long while. The stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression, an economic reversal that is almost unimaginably horrific in today’s terms, happened the moment the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was passed in committee and was certain to pass in the full Senate and House in due course. That act, which didn’t come close to eliminating trade but did swing the pendulum back toward a more closed trade environment, precipitated a massive worldwide depression. I can’t come up with any argument that says that Canada could go into a more protectionist phase without dreadful consequences. If the US couldn’t do it without blasting a huge hole in its own foot, why would we think we could or should?

KA: I disagree with you about the causes of the Great Depression — runaway stock market speculation, enormous and growing wealth disparity as the Roaring Twenties were coming to a close, and shareholder anxiety that the castle of capitalism was built on air, spelled doom, I believe.

RM: No one can be definitive on the causes of the Great Depression, so your view is in many respects as legitimate as mine. However, I would discourage you from believing that overheated stock markets are correlated with subsequent economic contractions. They aren’t, at least for economic contractions over the last century in North America. One consistent precursor is the shrinking of the money supply in advance of the beginning of an economic contraction while the economy is still growing. In many respects, the biggest problem for a growing economy occurs when central bankers declare — whether true or not — that the stock market is overheated and slam the brakes on liquidity in the economy.

KA: Does economic globalization mean — pace Thomas Friedman, at least this far — that the world is flat, that nation-states are (and will continue to be) much diminished by the requirements of transnational corporations and the need to build massive trading blocs. (And doesn’t your “spiky world” — nodes of high corporate activity and success — erupt from Friedman’s flat, and somewhat homogenized, Earth?) If I am reading you correctly, one need not own the means of production in order to ensure sovereignty, that as long as Canada has oil and gas in the ground and valuable rocks there will be suitors and we will benefit.

RM: It’s true that you don’t need to own the means of production to ensure sovereignty. There are lots of aspects of sovereignty, and having valuable material in or on your land helps enormously. Chile expresses its sovereignty to a greater extent than Paraguay because it has much more in the way of metals and minerals, ocean ports, and an income level four times higher.

The Thomas Friedman notion of a flat world and the Richard Florida notion of a spiky world are not entirely inconsistent or at odds. The infrastructure underlying the global economy is flattening — i.e., most countries are adopting the same “operating system” of capitalist democracy; university education is globalizing so you can get an engineering degree in China and India that teaches the same material as in North America; labour markets are globalizing. However, the industrial clusters that build on that flattening infrastructure are getting spikier. So the world is in different ways getting simultaneously flatter and spikier.