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This is a Red Herring attack on the principles of free market economics.

Like the rest of the libertarian fringe, free market fundamentalists put the principle above every other consideration. Free markets are a tool to increase wealth, help ensure individual freedom, and provide for the wants and needs of people. They are not, in and of themselves, an absolute good that transcends all others. As a principle it is important, but not ultimate.

As a practice, we don't have anything close to free markets, and there is no political constituency to create truer, freer markets. Real free markets perhaps existed in the late 19th century. They were free of troublesome legislation and government regulation. They included 12 hour work days as routine, child labor was widespread, and famously workers locked into sweatshops burnt to death when buildings caught fire. But HEY! It was a real free market!

Strangely "the sheeple" seem to have almost zero interest in going back to these conditions. Perhaps they recall the stuggles their grandfathers and grandmothers went through to win the regulations and containment of the free market that we have today. I don't know. I've never seen a poll conducted on it.

Buisness owners have now taken to simply exporting entire factories as the obvoius end around to this. The "Free Market" fetishists insist this is good for everyone, but really WalMart products are not THAT cheap.

There are obvious soluitions, such as tarrifs and immigration limitations that, yes, might result in some "protected" goods costing more. So? The alternative seems to be Brazilification of our economy.

How can Americans compete with Chinese when to hire someone in the USA the company has to comply with: OSHA, EPA, OOEC, Labor Department and Misc. State and Local regulations, while paying for LTD insurance, workman's comp insurane, Social Security, Medicare, state taxes, local taxes.

The Free Market Fetishists answer is we should do away with all these!! Brilliant - to compete with China we will turn into China!!

I don't see jobs being wholesale exported to Sweden or Germany. Perhaps we can have free trade with our equals, that is other nations that have functioning post-industrial societies. We can not, and should not, insist that American workers compete with Chinese (who would be shot if they tried to organize a real labor union).

Free Trade: means to an end. Tarrifs: another means to an end. Both are useful tools if used wisely and blunt instruments capable of causing great damage if used unwisely.

The problem is that most of the market interventions, starting with the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 1890s and continuing to the present day, were not driven from the bottom up but from the top down. Many very wealthy men of the Robber Baron era, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, were not advocates of free enterprise, but of regulated markets. The "reforms" of that era were usually backed by these men, who saw in regulated competition a means of protecting their market share. The politicians of that era did it in the name of "the little people", as much as modern politicians like Bill Clinton locked up coal reserves in Utah, supposedly in the name of the environment, but actually to benefit his financial supporters, in this case Mochtar Riady.

If we look at the "reforms" of the Roosevelt and Truman eras, such as protection for labor union organizing, minimum wage laws, and so forth, much of the old Northeastern Anglo-Protestant elite, the heirs of the Robber Barons, did vigorously oppose these measures, as evidenced by the support of the anti-New Deal Liberty League by old line families like the Du Ponts and the Mellons. However, the New Deal era represented a shift in the nation's elites away from the industrial based business class toward a newer group coming from academia and the social sciences, with some allies in the financial community. This is not a new event in American history, as in the pre-Civil War era, the industrialist class became dominant over the plantation and mercantile elites that had dominated the early republic. From about 1880 to 1930, the educational and religious institutions with roots in the Anglo-Protestant upper classes, such as the Ivy League universities and the mainline Protestant denominations, became dominated by secularists and liberals who believed that human betterment could be achieved through government planning and control. In other words, the grandsons of the Robber Barons scrapped classical economics and Herbert Spencer individualism with Keynesian notions and John Dewey influenced collectivism. These Ivy League types dominated the FDR Brain Trust, and with the help of the labor union movement, defeated and overturned the old Republican ascendancy.

As with the Progressive movement of the 1890-1920 era, the New Deal reforms were not driven from the bottom up, but the top down. The spiritual descendants of the Brain Trust and in a few instances the lineal descendants like Harold Icke continue on in the top advisers of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. To a lesser extent, they are influential in the GOP, through both the country club and neo-conservative factions of the party.

The bottom line is that all of the so-called reform movements from the 1880s to today have been driven by an elite group, whether industrialists, bankers, or academics, and not by the middle or lower classes.