Today there is great disparity of wages between countries. In countries with high wages for labor, doing away with most tariffs and other trade restrictions cannot be justified by its effect on the quality of life of all the masses, as Adam Smith had done . Those who call up Smith's Lessee Fare arguments abuse his justification. Lower wages were precluded by subsistence wages in Smith's day. In our country there is room for wage cuts. To get around this Milton Freedman and other conservative economists argue {hereafter I will just use Freedman to stand for their ilk} that wage cuts the flight of unskilled production jobs will encouraging the masses to obtain better education so that they may obtain higher paying skilled employment.
What seems to have escaped Milty's mind is that we already have millions of higher educated folks who can not find jobs...We tried Milton's ideas and they don't work...
Sure, tariffs will cause higher prices but more that that, they will give us back our jobs...At which time, the forces of what the market will bear will control the costs...
I'm no fan of Milton Freedman and he's part of the reason this Country's in the financial mess it is in...
you know more than friedman?