[Will88]

Generally it is a straw man for Protectionists to make points against.

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".

[Alberta's Child]

1992 was the last year the U.S. had a trade surplus with Mexico. In that year, the U.S. exported $40.5 billion worth of products, and raw materials to Mexico, and imported $35 billion from them.

In 2017, U.S. exports to Mexico were $243 billion, and imports from Mexico were $314 billion -- for a trade deficit of about $71 billion.

There are plenty of smart people here on FreeRepublic, and in all the times I've been posting numbers like this I have yet to hear from a single one of them who can make an objective case that the U.S. was better off in 1992 than in 2017 on the basis of these figures alone.

[arrogantsob]

State managed trade is not Free Trade, why can’t you understand that?

Free trade is a theory not a reality. Given the enormous growth in government we will never see Free Trade but trade terms determined by governments and the international oligopolies which dominate modern capitalism.