"Free Trade" is a SCAM. It always has been.

[Urchin]

71. This is how it went

Here's how I think it worked:

Free trade enabled low-interest rates that have enriched asset holders over decades.

The plan was to keep interest rates low so that those people who invested in assets: homeowners, 401K holders, and the super-rich, could benefit from enormous gains.

Middle-class people who owned homes and had 401Ks, were very happy to see low-interest rates because they seemed to be making tons of money.

Meanwhile, offshoring the production of goods and services made most everything else cheap, which made it easy for the establishment to say we were in a time of low inflation so it was OK to continue low-interest rates.

The backdoor cost to this scheme, was the impoverishment of people who didn't own assets--especially the young who on becoming adults had little economic opportunity--but also the lower classes, whose jobs were first replaced by offshoring.

As for the older people who had assets of greatly inflated value, even they probably still approved of the scheme when they eventually lost their jobs. Only after they were unable to find jobs again and were forced to sell their assets did they probably realize it wasn't such a good plan after all. But they would be in the minority and they would be picked off by the new economy in small isolated numbers here and there over the years, their peers choosing to believe that they themselves would either hold on to their middle-class jobs or find another quickly should they lose their jobs.

In addition to investment assets which soaked up liquidity like a sponge and skyrocketed in value, the only other exception to low prices, were the few remaining goods and services that haven't been offshored, especially education and healthcare. But hey, mostly only those people who haven't "arrived" have to worry about education costs. For those that have arrived, any extra education and health insurance their employers pay for.

Each administration had no choice but to continue to keep the national Ponzi scheme going. Had any president told the people the truth, the majority of voters--who benefitted from owning assets, would have voted that president and party out of office.