Good article, but here he engages in a little chicanery of his own. Free Trade is not Free Trade in the proper sense of the word, Free Trade itself is chicanery and double speak in that it is artificially manipulated to the disadvantage of one nation as opposed to another. Fair Trade demands a level and equitable playing field between trading partners.
The word "fair" appears nowhere in the Constitution. For the very good reason that "fairness" is in the eye of the beholder. It is for example "fair" in the eyes of the Communist or the Islamicist for criticism of Communist or Islamist governments to be severely punished, while all outside the fold of the anointed are treated as automatically evil.So the Constitution defines processes rather than outcomes. Not a "fair" result, but a process which everyone understands going in. What is called "free trade" may in a particular case not be such, but it is at least a defined concept. You define "fair" as "a level playing field"--yet no playing field has ever been perfectly level, and free trade assumes the existence of reasons to trade in the first place--reasons for buying your car instead of making it, thereby trading with the State of Michigan in whatever goods your labor produces.
The extreme case of "the level playing field" argument would eliminate all reason for trade. Elimination of all trade can be accomplished more honestly and simply by a straighforward embargo, like that imposed by Japan before trade was forcibly opened up by an American admiral.
The truth is that even if we were able to isolate ourselves from competition based on geography, and even if the job we are doing is in a growing business, we are always competing with the future possibility that our own work may be automated out of existence just like that of the telephone operator or the elevator operator. The job of chauffeur was essentially automated out of existence preemptively--Henry Ford rejected the idea that the market for automobiles was limited by the number of men who would drive them for a living, and made cars that people drove for their own transportation, just as people in the elevator select for themselves the floor to which the elevator will go.