Reply #14: The other bogus argument is "What do you have against Third World people having good jobs?"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

This is bogus because no country has ever made its way to prosperity through the type of pure "free" trade that the Economist and others advocate.

India? Yes, it has a growing middle class and thousands upon thousands of engineers--as well as 40% illiteracy and poor people who are worse off than ever because they can't afford the new higher prices for necessities.

China? What China practices is not "free" trade. It has tariffs galore. It also has uneven development, not as uneven as in India, but a huge gap between the rich and poor.

Korea and Taiwan and Japan? They always stayed fully in charge of their own economies. They welcomed foreign investment but made it clear who was in charge. Japan led the way in the nineteenth century, when it invited a British company to build a railroad. The British company offered to stay on and run the railroad for them, but the Japanese government said, "Thanks but no thanks. We'd rather have you train some Japanese people to run it." That was the Japanese approach. "Thank you for your expertise. Now get out of our way."

Korea and Taiwan served as sources of cheap labor in the 1960s and 1970s, but they insisted that the foreign companies train locals for technical and management positions and transfer their technology to the host country.

Meanwhile, Mexico, supposedly the glorious poster child for "free" trade, with its much touted "growing middle class," is unable to provide enough jobs for its people, and the farmers are being driven off the land by cheap agricultural imports from the U.S., which only adds to the unemployment problem.

"Free" trade is a cult like Libertarian economics. It doesn't work in real life, but the devotees never let that stop them. If you challenge them, they tell you that trade isn't "free" enough.