Reply #15: The wealthy elites have taken David Ricardo's free trade theory and bastardized it.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Free trade today is nothing more than a corrupt investment/outsourcing scheme to rob wealth and political power from the working class. It's not Ricardo's free trade when you ship labor and capital out of one country (USA) to another country just so you can hire slave-wage workers, bypass all environmental, labor, product safety laws, etc., and then allow the CEO's and wealthy stockholders to pocket the difference. It's not Ricardo's free trade when you allow your trading partners 15-20 years to lower their tariffs, while we lower ours almost immediately. It's not Ricardo's free trade when you allow your trading partners to charge a 10-30% VAT, while we have no VAT on imports from them.

Our economists have been bought and paid for by the giant corporations and their investors and so have the politicians. These people not only drink the Kool-Aid, they fucking swim in it for their daily exercise.