We were worse than Mexico before free trade. We were a colony, but those Puritans really could smuggle. They even thought it honorable. They viewed the right to trade as a natural right and the product of their labor as their very own.
They’d been just about not taxed at all and the black market for goods was a thriving one that irked Great Britain to no end.
The British were mercantilists back then. They hated free trade and this mistake lost them the entire US.
Why do you think the WTO is free trade?
I was referring to modern times, or at least post revolution when we became the United States. Mexico became a nation decades later.
WTO is not free trade. It is trade managed by unelected globalist bureaucrats. We should have nothing to do with them.