[VanDeKoik]

Well there is free trade and free-for-all trade.

Free trade is what nations on roughly equal footing engage in because we both can mutually benefit from it.

What we have with China is the later. We buy everything from them, and they have all of our manufacturing capacity, so why would they need to buy anything from us?

Reeling that back too fast will wreck the U.S. economy completely, unfortunately.

[central_va]

[Alberta's Child]

It's important to note that all of the controversy surrounding "free trade" is mainly a function of the industrial age. In agrarian economies there wasn't much concern about the impacts of trade because nature pretty much ensured that trade couldn't become "predatory" in any way. If you owned a grain farm in Iowa you didn't have to worry about competition from Great Britain, for example, because the growing conditions for grain in Iowa -- combined with the cost of transporting grain from other places -- always favored the Iowa farmer for the domestic U.S. grain market.

That all changed with industrialization because manufacturing is a capital-intensive process where there are no major natural advantages like you have in agriculture. As a result, manufacturing tended to migrate to places where: (1) the cost of materials and the availability of transportation infrastructure were favorable for industry, and (2) government policies made it attractive to do business.

Having said that ... China didn't surpass the U.S. in GDP because of anything related to trade policy. China was eventually going to surpass the U.S. in GDP no matter what -- because China's population is something like four times the size of ours.