The Case against Free Trade By Ian Fletcher Volume 22, Number 4 (Summer 2012)
This article shows how global communism’s stealth tool, Cultural Marxism / political correctness / multiculturalism has successfully infiltrated economic decisions on the right as well as the left.
The enemy within has been very successful in creating a story for the ‘right’ about free trade, comparative advantage, compassionate amnesty, open borders, jobs Americans can’t/won’t do, free movement of goods and people, harmonization, and quarterly profits uber alles, removing patriotism and morality from economic decisions. This story leads to the same place as the one for the ‘left’ - destruction of the American economy, security, national sovereignty, traditional culture, values and its pesky middle class under the tyranny of global communism.
Marx recommended free trade, the free movement of capital over national boundaries, i.e. unencumbered by ethics or patriotism, as a way to speed up the onset of global communism. He knew corporations would chase the cheapest labor and working conditions around the globe until we all were reduced to living like serfs in third world countries. At that point the populace will welcome the promise of ‘hope and change’ offered by a global communist / fascist government.
Although the author of the article, Ian Fletcher is an economist you will note he mentions both Globalism and World Government.
"America’s establishment remains clueless why stimulus after stimulus is failing to revive our economy, which continues to limp through the feeblest recovery on record. A big part of the problem, which our globalist rulers won’t admit, is that so much stimulus is leaking abroad due to our trade deficit, thus stimulating the economies of foreign nations, not our own. . . . Make no mistake: our trade is in crisis. . . . Why is this happening? Largely because the U.S. is competing under self-imposed free-trade rules against foreign nations with aggressively mercantilist trade strategies. Free traders act as if we are operating in a global free market, but we are not. We are instead in a contest with various types of state capitalism just as real as the contest we once fought against communism.
Trade is rigged. Foreign governments subsidize their exports. And they block American exports: the Congressional Research Service once identified 751 different types of barriers to American exports worldwide. . . . Trade agreements sign away democratic control over our health, safety, labor law, immigration law, fiscal policy, financial stability, national security, environmental policy, and other things. And—not to indulge in WTO conspiracy theory but in the interests of calling a spade a spade—they are also a possible back door to eventual world government, or at least global governance intrusive enough to cripple national sovereignty. . . . Don’t misunderstand any of this as a plea to end trade. Trade is a good thing, and the case against free trade does not entail autarky. But trade, and free trade, are not the same thing, any more than love and free love. . . .
Some highlights from the article which is good but very long:
“American” multinational corporations that call the shots in Washington don’t care about America’s trade performance
The intellectual arrogance of academic economists who lost touch with the real world decades ago stresses low-cost imports, but ignore the other side of the equation: declining wages and job opportunities.
Even if the theoretical case for free trade were valid, it wouldn’t apply to the world we live in today.
Free trade is only a good thing if a long list of assumptions are true and they aren’t. Capital mobility, persistent deficits, short time horizons, externalities (an economists’ term for when prices don’t fully reflect economic reality) . . . the list of glitches in the free-trade model goes on and on.
Popular myths that don’t stand up to reality:
Free trade is good for America because it means a billion Chinese are now hungry consumers of American products. But America is running a huge deficit, not a surplus, with very protectionist China.
A related myth is this: “Other nations are rapidly catching up to American wage levels." India, for example, has a middle class of 250 million people. India’s average income is only about $1,500 a year.
“Free trade costs America low-quality jobs but brings high-quality jobs in their place.” But the hard data actually show America losing both kinds of jobs.
“Free trade is the American way.” Sorry, but the United States was a protectionist nation from its founding until we threw open our markets in the Cold War as a bribe for foreign nations not to go communist. That’s why Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution explicitly authorizes tariffs.
Results of Free Trade in the current and three prior administrations:
Free trade is rotting away America’s industrial base as foreign nations target and conquer industry after industry.
When American producers are pushed out of foreign and domestic markets, it is not just immediate profits that are lost. Also lost are scale economies, driving up their costs and making them even less competitive. Less profit means less money to plow into future technology development. And when an industry shrinks, it ceases to support the complex web of skills, many of them outside the industry itself,
America is now being invisibly shut out of future industries which dying or already-lost industries would have spawned