[Carry_Okie]

It means we as a country put broad swaths of the non-union, rural south out of work for no benefit to the consumer. The benefit was higher retail gross margin.

Another "benefit" was to mask inflation so that the Fed could keep printing money without apparent consequence, loaning it to the big guys who built factories overseas with it.

[RegulatorCountry]

Well, yes and no. China being by far and away the beneficiary of such trade policy, with their currency pegged to the US Dollar, it's not quite as simple as that, otherwise Fed “printing” would have led to a yuan that was stronger by comparison. Due to the peg it didn't. While the end result might look the same, the reality was and is more akin to domestic wage suppression that has kept broader inflation in check, although we have seen something along those lines in hard assets, goods and services that are not dependent upon those wages that are being suppressed. We've also seen it in consumables with inelastic demand. Pretty Machiavellian. Hard-boiled communists would be proud of making the bourgeoisie scream in such a manner.