We have never had Free Trade, no country ever has. Generally it is a straw man for Protectionists to make points against. Theoretically it explains and shows how free trade maximizes economic goals.
Small towns are being destroyed, not by free trade, but by the infrastructure costs which can’t be spread over as large a group of rate payers. Federal guidelines, for example, requires sewage treatment to produce an effluent which is nearly drinkable. This is enormously expensive and in some cases unnecessary. Drinking water is subject to the same kind of restrictions.
Then you have the major problem: the lack of opportunity in small towns and even small cities.
Young people leave to a place they can make a living and have opportunity. My experience is illustrative. I was raised in a small town and loved life there but upon getting the education modernity requires found there was no place for me there. My education would have been wasted. It wasn’t in Chicago.
What douche bag comment. You deserve to rot in hell with all the other traitors.
Nonsense! Generally the free trade argument has been a straw man for the globalists, in the form of a collection of lies about how it would open up vast new foreign markets for US products, when in reality what it did was remove tariffs on US imports and make it highly attractive for US manufacturers to move production to cheap labor nations and export back to US virtually tariff free..
All that was foreseen by many in the early '90s including Ross Perot and a few members of Congress, and many in the American public.
NAFTA created the inevitable "giant sucking sound".
More nonsense. That infrastructure had existed in small towns for generations and even centuries in same cases, and had been upgraded as needed over those periods of time.
And there is still opportunity in small towns for many. Many small towns still have industries and there are manufacturing jobs, jobs in the skilled trades, and there are doctors, lawyers, school teachers and often hospitals and local government jobs.
I grew up in one that continues to thrive due to a locally grown business that supplies near 1,000 jobs. All small towns are not dying and the ones that are were mostly killed by government policies.