Free trade benefits american investors at the expense of american workers. However, the process of globalization is unstoppable and it's utopian to think that much can be done to help either the American worker or the environment until the process of worldwide equalization of standards, living conditions, and legal structures progresses much further than at present.
Firstly, the benefits accrue not only to investors (who are incidentally, oftentimes foreign) but also to consumers. Both are numerous categories: the vast majority of Americans are investors, and all are consumers. Most Americans benefit thus, even if you assume that a SMALL number of workers lose in the SHORT-run.
Secondly, you take workers as an immutable entity. They are not: displaced workers in outdated industries do not become permanently unemployed: they find other jobs.
Thirdly, the very criterion you employ to compute benefits is faulty. Consider, for instance, the IT sector. The decades-long shortage of labor in that are translated into premium paid to programmer over what they would get in the absence of shortage. Now the internet has enabled employers to outsource some of that work, and programmers' wages well. Does that hurt American workers?
YOu answer in the positive: wages fell, hence workers are hurt. But that includes the tacit assumption that the previous wages were somehow justified. One can easily say that the present, lower wages are normal, and the previous ones were unreasonably high (due to shortage). It was AMERICAN consumers and AMERICAN investors (pretty much everybody who has any savings at all) who subsidized --- and for decades were held hostage by --- programmers and other IT specialist.
In sum, you make a rather popular error of only looking that the LATEST change to assess the situation. That is a fallacy. If you confiscate from me $1M, that is not necessarily a robbery: I may have previously robbed the bank and was not entitled to that money. You will not be able to deduced that, however, if you only look at the latest change.
However, the process of globalization is unstoppable and it's utopian to think that much can be done to help either the American worker or the environment until the process of worldwide equalization of standards, living conditions, and legal structures progresses much further than at present.
This is another popular misconception, rather popular in the socialist (morern-day liberal circles). The "equalization" occurs in a dynamical system only if it is closed. Neither the humankind nor America is a closed system, and no equalization is mandatory. The process of globalization has been in place forever, and we have never been anywhere close to what may be viewed as equality of living standard and even less similarity of social institution.
Don't feel bad: Lenin too fell for the same error.
What does a liberal --- and, judging by your remarks, VERY liberal Larry is doing on a conservative forum?
Yep. It's tough living in changing times. My own profession (programming) has pretty much been outsourced. There are jobs, but it's a buyer's market. Imagining a painless solution, however, is tough. Every attempt to prevent a qualified person from immigrating or taking a remote job just means that some government is stepping on someone's freedom.