Mercantilist Argument Analysis

There are many perspectives people have when it comes to TNC’s, for example; activists and some nation-states have begun to challenge TNC’s, including the liberal capitalist system. One example of this is the “Occupy Wall Street movement that has focused popular attention on the inequality that invariably accompanies the spread of TNC’s and lightly regulated capitalism” (Balaam and Dillman 433). Fast developing countries such as China, Brazil, and India have created giant state controlled companies that “The Economist magazine claims represent a form of state capitalism and the most difficult foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far” (Balaam and Dillman 433). Liberals argue that “given this underlying identity of national and cosmopolitan

Different from liberals and structuralists, they believe that economic relations cause conflicts because they tend to view the world as a zero sum game in which one person’s gain is another person’s loss. One mercantilist is Kari Polanyi Levitt who argued that “transnational corporations are more similar to the trading corporations of the mercantilistic era such as the British East India Company than to the free traders and finance capitalists that characterized British enterprise in the nineteenth century” (Gilpin 189). According to the mercantilist argument, “the transnational corporation reflects a contemporary form of the economic expansion of particular nation states” (Gilpin 189). This argument follows the view of zero sum game because it is basically saying that “only particular nation states have been on the defensive, not the nation state as a political, especially the United States, have been on the economic offensive, expanding at the expense of other nation states” Gilpin 189). The role of the TNC has been viewed by political leaders in mercantilist terms of “maintaining America’s share of world markets, of securing a strong position in foreign economies, and of controlling access to raw materials; even more important, the TNC is judged is judged to be a major generator of the foreign earnings required to ensure national prosperity and to finance American military and political commitments overseas” (Gilpin