Trading Spaces

Peter Drucker has these interesting thoughts in his article "Trading Spaces":

Information as a concept and a distinct category is an invention of the 18th century--of the newspaper in England and the encyclopedia in France. Within a century, information became global with the development of the modern postal system in the 1830s, followed almost immediately by the electric telegraph and the first computer language, the Morse Code. But unlike the newspaper and the encyclopedia, neither the postal service nor the telegraph made information public. On the contrary, they made it "privileged communication." "Public information" by contrast--newspapers, radio, television--ran one way only, from the publisher to the recipient. The editor rather than the reader decided what was "fit to print."
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Farm subsidies are now the only net income of French farmers, as their crops produce nothing but net losses and are grown only as the entitlement for the subsidies.
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But mercantilism is increasingly becoming the policy of "blocs" rather than of individual nation-states. These blocs--with the European Union the most structured one, and the U.S.-dominated NAFTA trying to embrace the entire Western Hemisphere (or at least North and Central America)--are becoming the integrating units of the new world economy. Each bloc is trying to establish free trade internally and to abolish within the bloc all hurdles, restrictions and impediments, first to the movement of goods and money and ultimately to the movement of people.
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At the same time, each bloc is becoming more protectionist against the outside.
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A mercantilist world economy, however, faces the same problems that led to the ultimate collapse of mercantilist national policies: It is impossible to export unless someone imports.
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China may similarly attain leadership through its world-class competence in manufacturing management--the legacy of the communist emphasis on output and production.

HT t0 Marginal Revolution for the link.