The consequence of Free Trade

The consequence of Free Trade is that individuals that can do everything extremely well are unemployed and can’t get a job doing anything. Thus you see the engineer and the PhD bagging groceries or driving taxi cabs. Free trade was supposed to engage those with specialties that can do things more productively. However, it has backfired with exactly the opposite result. Those with specialties are now collecting unemployment, social security, and disability compensations.

Forgive me for that tirade. You can find more logical arguments disassembling Free Trade arguments at the following link.

Disassembling Free Trade Arguments

The conclusion of the given link:

At one time, Edward Leamer exhorted our profession to “take the con out of econometrics.” He wasn’t exhorting economists to stop doing empirical research, or even to do it in a particularly di¤erent fashion. Rather, he was exhorting them to be forthright about what could be claimed about the research, e.g., that it was a “speci…cation search.” Trade economists should do likewise: they should be forthright about what and what not economic analysis has to say about the desirability of free trade, and they should be forthright about the epistemological basis of their policy advocacy of free trade.

The only valid argument in favor of ‘Free Trade’ is that it will make a bigger pie.

But who will have that bigger pie? Not this generation of American workers. They are being sacrificed to make a ‘bigger pie’ for stock holders and workers of other countries.

Theory predicts that eventually there may be a ‘bigger pie’. Or maybe not . But it will not be shared by the American manufacturing worker.

Sectors of the population are not hurt in a perfect or utopian society. This would not happen in a Utopian State or it would not be utopian.