Hi Facebook, Google, we think we might tax your ads instead – lots of love, Europe x

Import taxes are not normally used to correct for differences in tax regimes. They're normally used to protect cherished local industries against competition. Sometimes that competition may be getting an "unfair" advantage. Though how you define unfair is rather tough. China's labour is cheaper than ours because they're massively poorer than us as a country for example. They've also got lower employment and environmental standards for much the same reason.

Already as they've got richer in the last decade, they're now upping those environmental standards - because a bit of extra money is now less valuable than not choking to death on the streets of many cities. A situation that the UK went through an identical version of in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

As a general rule of thumb, international trade makes the world as a whole richer. As it generally makes the global economy more efficient. And this latest explosion of globalisation has only stagnated living standards in a chunk of the West for about 15 years - meanwhile bringing a couple of billion poeple out of extreme poverty, and maybe growing the global middle class by some hundreds of millions.

The whole world is massively richer than its ever been, millions of lives have been saved, birth rates are falling as infant mortality has plummeted and almost everyone is doing better than they've ever done before. At a relatively low cost to the already developed countries.

Globalisation and free trade has been a success.

But, or course it ain't perfect. There are downsides - which need to be dealt with.

Lots of economic corrections take time. And while they slowly happen, people's lives get dislocated by economic changes and it's not much use saying that the economy will correct and return to equilibrium in twenty years time. As Keynes said, "in the long-run we're all dead."

For that, you need government, to come in and soften the blow. And try to speed up recovery in areas adversely affected by globalisation. And tidy up the edges, and stop people from taking the piss.

But it's really important to remember the good bits about international trade, as well as the bad bits. Criticise idiot free-marketeers all you like, but only if you're willing to look at the people attacking globalisation and say, "what are the costs of reversing it?"