competition used to be based on know-hows.
Know-hows were the holy grail of the civilization for that last 2000 years.
take a simple case. Let's say you bought a mirror from, say, Walmart, to hang in your living room.
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Mirror
then it comes a funny combo of many oddball events. Labor union and American tort lawyers won early rounds against capitalists by take advantage of democracy and juror trial justice systems. So the capitalists turned around and started to subscribe the "free trade" philosophies from a few scholars who had the innocent belief in a more universally optimized resource utilization. The capitalists, however, have only a simple agenda which is to make more money and pay less cost.
Then it came the computer, CD-ROM and fiber-optic internet backbone. The know-hows, the industrial intelligence, what it used to take centuries for a country to develop on its own, now can be packaged and transferred, legally or not, in a matter of days, hours, minutes. For a few instances where the internet fails to delivery, the modern sea shipping industry extends a helping hand. A whole factory can be now broken into parts, packaged into contains, moved on the a different continents and re-assemebled.
