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.
Years ago National Review used to run essays by Wilhelm Roepke, one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society as well as being the author of the postwar German economic miracle.
Roepke’s best known book was his ‘A Humane Economy’, in which he argued that non-market factors have to be included in economic policy making because people can’t be disposed of in the way that obsolete machinery can. And this is a view that Trump obviously shares, because he is interested in returning jobs to the Rust Belt for more than simple economic reasons.