[DoughtyOne]

Well I don't know everything there is to know about the NAFTA agreement, but I do know 32,000 pages is a lot of government legalease.

We can carry out trade with any nation we desire right now at this very moment. Please gift us with your deep well of knowledge, as to why we should sign another binding agreement like NAFTA, when it isn't necessary for the conduct of trade.

[Publius Valerius]

Let me start off with a pretty basic economic premise: tariffs are bad. Tariffs create economic waste. In the big picture, everyone loses.

Everyone, even the government, recognizes this. So each government desires to eliminate tariffs, so its citizens will benefit from free trade. However, politics and tariffs are inseparable. A politician, like it or not, can't just lower tariffs unilaterally (despite that a unilateral elimination of tariffs would benefit society as a whole) because of the political impact of elimination of tariffs.

So recognizing this, we've gotten together with Canada and Mexico and negotiated a trade agreement (Of course, we already had pretty much the exact same trade deal in place with Canada at the time the NAFTA was drafted, but no one ever mentions this--we also had a similar agreement with Mexico as far as its maquiladoras went; again, no ever mentions this. Apparently, people think the NAFTA just appeared out of thin air one day).

Anyway, so we've gotten together with Canada and Mexico and everyone agreed to lower tariffs on all of these products, like desks and chairs and computers and strawberries and books and magazines and lumber and services too! So, as a result of the NAFTA, all of the citizens in Mexico and Canada and United States can buy from each other most goods as if there is no tariff, thereby lowering the economic waste! And the political reality is that that simply couldn't happen without the NAFTA.

So, to answer your question, the NAFTA isn't necessary for conducting trade, of course. We traded long before the NAFTA. We just all got screwed before.