Free Market, Flat World

The present Presidential candidates and the general tenor of a lot of the press lately really concerns me that Americans just don't get it. You cannot go to Ohio and promise a dude you are going to protect his job from foreigners, at least unless you are lying through your teeth or unless you are completely inept. This article from the Economist about the recent debate in Ohio puts it pretty eloquently.

Let's summarize what free trade does for us:

Positives:

1) less expensive consumer goods

2) puts upward pressure on jobs to what many consider more fulfilling jobs

3) Improves the standard of living around the world

4) Stabilizes and moderates international relations (China is not about to nuke us when they own 33% of our debt)

5) Arguably leads to greater democratization and freedom in other countries (skilled labor means the government has to treat you better)

6) Free trade and greater prosperity abroad means less desperate migrants coming here. Don't like Mexicans coming to the US? Would they come here if they could provide for their family in Mexico? Will locking them out and putting up trade barriers lead to more or less migration? (Note: I am very favorable toward legal migration)

7) Globalization and our economic position is key to our leadership of the world. Trying to back out of the system will lead to big problems for us.

Negatives:

1) regional disruption of employment as some jobs move overseas and ones replacing them don't appear in the same distribution (you can't really say that we are losing jobs overseas when the unemployment figures nation wide are at all time lows)

2) Potential adversaries and rivals are gaining technologically (we need to turn our education system around to reverse this!) We should rejoice that many people across the planet are being uplifted from poverty

3) Environmental damage-some countries are in such a race to prosperity that they are willing to tear up their ecosystems to do it.

The bottom line is that globalization has done great things for us and the rest of the world. It's not perfect, but it's not China's or Mexico's fault, and in some cases it's not even the government's fault. It's people failing to Cowboy-up and put an effort into their education and competitiveness (in some cases). Politicians aren't going to tell you that. Trying to pull out of NAFTA or putting together some kind of crazy protective tariff regime would be absolutely insane and would do untold damage to this country. You would see MORE (not less) illegal immigration, higher prices for just about everything (which would hurt a whole lot more working class people a whole lot more than you have now with some losing jobs temporarily), and our exports would plummet as other countries also erect tariffs in a trade war. People's retirement funds would drop, especially if you invested in any emerging market we encouraged into free trade, only to pull the rug out from under them and leave them hanging. Oh, and kiss international peace and stability goodbye as the "Functioning Core" splinters and the "Non-Integrated Gap" widens.

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