More American lives were lost in the civil war than any other our history, but now as we open with free trade to obtain goods manufactured from slave wages, one has to wonder if as a nation we learned our lesson , or what will be our future as join other nations who don't have laws protecting human dignity.
Free Trade agreements like WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, are nothing but surrender of our sorveignity to bunch of third world bureaucrats who can over-rule our laws and our constitution.
Also, I want to ask the FREE TRAITORS that how come when we didn't have FREE TRADE and very few illegal aliens, even a janitor could afford to buy a house(AMERICAN DREAM)?
"In an economy with an expanding money supply, it is conceivable for everyone to earn more money at the same time, and for the prices of all goods to rise on a steady and regular basis. This, of course, is a description of the American economy for most of the twentieth century. But these features of our inflationary economy obscure the actual process by which our living standards are increased, because they mislead us into thinking that the source of our increased prosperity is the greater quantity of dollars we tend to receive over time for our services. For the sake of conceptual clarity, therefore, we imagine in what follows an economy with an unchanging quantity of money.
The key to the process whereby the unhampered market increases the average standard of living involves business investment in capital goods that increase the productivity of labor—that is, the amount of output that each worker is capable of producing. A forklift makes it possible for a worker to move and stack far more pallets than before, and to reach heights that would have been impossible with his bare hands. Other kinds of machinery can multiply the efficiency of a single worker many times over, sometimes even by orders of magnitude. The amount of goods the economy is capable of producing rises, at times even explodes. This is how wealth is created."
nafta is NOT "free" trade, quite the contrary it's "managed" trade with over 900 pages of regulations.
Very simply, let the free market keep trade free. The Corporations know better. There is NO need for us to give up our rights. Did you know that within the 900 pages is a court system. What happened to our constitution and our rights?
www.stoptheftaa.org
If you have to pass a law to make it happen is it free trade?
One of the first examples of this trend was the War Between the States. Prior to the war, the South wanted free trade because it wanted the less expensive and better quality English and French goods at lower prices. The North wanted tariffs that would allow northern manufactured goods to compete with English and French goods. As each side was considering how to win a war, the South believed that the English and French would run any blockade set by the North in order to continue trading. The South learned that when the lead starts to fly, "free-traders" are the first to disappear. In times of national emergency, we don't want to be forced into relying on other nations to produce what we need.
Another issue is that true "free markets" depend on those who want to produce something paying all of the costs necessary for production. Much of the world has the security to run factories because the United States maintains a military that prevents thug nations from attacking those who try to produce things. If these little nations running factories that employ peasants and peasant wages were responsible for their own defense, the prices of their goods would be much higher. Likewise, many of these places have the infrastructure to sustain manufacturing only because they have received foreign aid from the United States. If we want "free trade" based on "free market" production costs, then we need to stop subsidizing overseas production.
China is not a free country. The worker in America is not competing with Chinese labor that is free to demand better wages for their work. When companies can operate under the conditions available over there, they can save labor costs because they are not dealing with a labor market in the same way that they would be in a free country.
Part of having allegiance to our country is that we try to do things that benefit the country as a whole. Deciding what policies fit that description is hard, but forcing Americans to decide between working for a couple of dollars a day or not having a job isn't something that benefits the country as a whole.
Finally, tariffs are the least intrusive form of taxation. An income tax puts the tax man into every part of your financial life. An income tax means that the government knows how much you make, how much you save, how you invest, whether you buy or rent your home, whether you marry, whether you have children, and a great deal of other information. A national retail sales tax would be less intrusive because the government would be interested only in when Americans buy and sell to one another, but a sales tax still puts the tax man in every commercial transaction. A tariff confines the tax man to the end of the dock. With a tariff, the government worries itself with what is coming into the country. (After 9/11, the government probably should be paying attention to what comes into the country.) However, once things arrive, the government doesn't put itself into any other part of our business. We can probably never go back to a system of having only tariffs, but tariffs are a step in the direction of less intrusion by the tax man.
Bill