[thoughtomator]

I used to be a big free trade kind of guy, but experience has shown that it’s a hypothetical thing only; the real world contains zero counterparties willing to free trade on even terms.

And if you’re free trading while the other partner is not, you’re going to get asset stripped, and your industrial base will be absconded with, as China has done to us over the past few decades.

Ultimately, free trade is immoral; it harms the survival of the nation in exchange for phantom benefits than never really materialize.

[Vince Ferrer]

Since free trade is a two way street, what other countries use free trade as a policy?

[Jim Robinson]

What do you do if your trading partners steal all your technical and IP property? What do you do when your trading partners obtain the chip sets and technical secrets and stuff used by your military to make your ships, planes and tanks lethal? What do you do after you offshore all your steel and aluminum producing capacity to your next enemy? What do you do after you’ve completely gutted all your manufacturing capacity, then suffer another Pearl Harbor? Gonna rely on your trading partners (China, for example) to build your ships, planes. missiles, tanks, trucks, guns and right on down to your combat boots?

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

Note that I am not economic nationalist but I wanted to present an argument to support free trade for the growing group of “America First” people on the right.

The free traders are all claiming we will economically fail because of tariffs. Trump is saying China leverages our free trade practice by cheating. That's all anyone is saying. I hear nothing but the same chest beating by the libertarians. I wish Trump would do a better job at explaining the means of cheating. It is clear that China has taken many manufacturing jobs from America. So have the Japanese and Koreans among others. Maybe it was American capitalists who saw foreign cheap labor who screwed America. It's a complex picture. I'm betting that Trump has a good understanding of the corruption associated with American Free Trade. He is a pragmatist, That is something libertarians can't grasp.

[House Atreides]

I prefer global economic growth through free trade to America First growth because an economically integrated planet is a more peaceful planet - the cost of war with a trading partner is too high. I also think we have more to gain by trading with all countries than we do by demonizing economic competitors.
**************************I*************
You fail to recognize that some “economic competitors” are, in fact, demonic and mean us ill.

[Sapwolf]

There is NO such thing as ‘free trade’ in human history.

There is ‘free trade’ in some economic books, but that is theory and real life involves human beings.

As a Kirk conservative, I have explained this over 35 years to what I refer to as the ideologue crowd of lazy-fair (my derogatory term for those who blindly preach it not understanding that 100% free trade never existed).

Now, you can emphasize trade in general, but it cannot EVER be pure true theoretical free trade because that is silly. It is as silly as ‘world peace’.

If you want to see the ideological results of allegedly ‘free trade’, visit all the areas of the country, including those counties that Trump won in the mid-west from the 2016 election.

Ideologues of the ‘free trade’ crowd are looking for that silver bullet of perfection which does not exist.

Trade generally is good, but since human nature gravitates in millions of ways, mercantile countries will always rack up large surpluses to those of deficit countries due to cultural and other factors because they know that their cultural well-being depends on its citizens having meaningful, steady and good-paying work as study after study shows how important this is to humans.

The ‘free trade’ ideology has gutted the USA gradually and Americans suffered tremendously. The only reason we are still a first world nation is due to the US Dollar still holding sway as the premier fiat currency thereby allowing us to rack up huge deficits without plummeting our standard of living across the board despite the standard of living getting stagnant for many since the 70’s.

If your citizens can’t hold their families together due to cultural issues and economic upheaval from free market capitalism, human beings as God made us, will not be able to resist the forces tearing apart society.

The ‘free trade’ is pushed by multi-national corporations who have NO loyalty to American citizens.

What good is it if imports have lower prices but you have no job and can only buy them on credit.

Tell the people who lost good jobs due to ‘free trade’ that it’s ok due to free trade.

And you wonder WHY people think Republicans are cold people.

[greedo]

tariffs should be placed on high value imports and raw material exports

“No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

 - Article. I. Section. 9. Constitution of the United States

[Olog-hai]

“[I]n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

— Karl Marx

Permit free trade between all nations regardless of communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

— Communist goal #4 of the list of 45 communist goals for the USA

This seems to explain why the left is in favor of free trade so much.

[Pelham]

What a load of self-serving nonsense.

[Mr. Blond]

Free traders never really factored in the effects of labor migration. It’s even worse in the modern, globally connected era.

[Vendome]

Fair trade does not disadvantage trading partners.

Free trade takes from one side advantages to itself while economically disemboweling the other side.

[DaxtonBrown]

Tariffs are used by Trump to encourage Free Trade. It isn’t free trade if the tariffs aren’t reciprocal.

[kabar]

We don’t have free trade. Almost every country in the world has a trade surplus with the US because they don’t allow us equal access to their markets. It is not a level playing field. American workers are paying the price of lost jobs and depressed wages.

[arthurus]

No. Mercantilism is not in the cards for the trump administration.Reverse Mercantilism- surely there is a specific name for it- is what the Social Democrats desire and will implement. That is bleeding the US for the rest of the world on the surface and for the international elites substantively. Trump is using tariff threats to try to stem the invasion through the southern border. He has no other tools because Congress is determined to promote the invasion as part of its own economic plan as well as insuring for Social Democrats their permanent ruling status.Trump is using tariffs against China to offset Chinese tariffs against our own exports and the wholesale theft of our technology/patents and to induce China to eliminate those tariffs for which we will eliminate ours. He is working always toward Free Trade with protection for intellectual property.

[silverleaf]

China is the worlds mercantilist, not America

[nathanbedford]

My view from three weeks ago. If you accept this view then every tactic, every means of defense, including tariffs, must be invoked to win. The president has been deprived by Congress of virtually every other tool with which to protect America from the existential threat represented by China.

----------------------

We have more than relative impoverishment to fear from the Chinese.

We have to fear the marriage of technology and totalitarianism.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

In the nearly 8 decades since Churchill exhorted his nation to its finest hour by warning of the danger of "perverted science" we face a larger, richer and far more technologically advanced potential adversary in China.

The repression visited by the Nazis on their own people and upon occupied peoples will be as nothing compared to a dark age empowered by modern technology. All that stands between that technology and our serfdom in a new dark age is our economy which funds our military. Lose that and then we have nothing left but to fall upon the mercies of a nation historically capable of horrors and murders on an inconceivable scale. The Chinese killed 60 million of their own in a great leap forward and they did it without technology. The madness of their cultural revolution exceeded even that of the French Revolution. For a quarter century we funded the stunning technological revolution of China, presuming their good intentions. Their history, their repression of their own people and their aggression both mercantilist and economic at strategic points around the globe, makes that presumption mortally dangerous.

The Chinese will not wage actual war on us until we are economically or technologically defenseless. They are waging preemptive war now, a war which if lost promises repression that will equal a sci-fi movie. To those who are inclined to discount the danger described here as gross exaggeration or cheap fear mongering, I ask only that the advantage of passivity in this war be compared to the downside of losing it.

This is not a war for economic dominance, this is a war for survival. The trade war is our 1940.

[JonPreston]

the concept of comparative advantage makes free trade a clear winner.

The concept of comparative advantage, as introduced by David Ricardo, Karl Marx's favorite economist, relies on honest partners and sovereign nations, not Chinese thieves secured by a Great Wall.

[central_va]

I-am-a-pimp. The rest of the world IS practicing mercantilism AGAINST THE USA. Talk to them and not us you loser. Go back to India....

[JonPreston]

You don't have a very high opinion of people who disagree with you, do you?

[Georgia Girl 2]

I don’t think you quite understand whats going on here so let me explain it to you.

First China is our competitor not our trading partner. They need us far more than we need them.

Demographics are not in China’s favor. Due to decades of a one child policy they have an aging population. Unlike the US China got old before they got rich.

The only reason that China has been able to compete with us is years of us allowing them to manipulate their currency, steal our intellectual property and put tariffs on our exports to them. This has culminated in allowing a country that is basically our enemy to enrich itself and engage in military expansion which is dangerous to its neighbors and the concept of open seas.

Trump is doing to China what Reagan did to Russia. He is forcing them to go head to head with the US economy which no country in the world can do without imploding. The sooner we get this over with the better.