[DugwayDuke]

"If a country signs a free trade agreement with the US, again it should have provisons to have workers have the same labor protections US workers have, that will give that countrys workers the ability to imporve their standard of living, rather than be de-facto slaves, and also the countrys that sign free trade agreements need to enact similar enviromental standards.

You realize, of course, that these are the positions of the big labor unions and democrat politicians? These positions allow one to impose unfettered regulation while avoiding their consequences.

[Jeff Head]

A true Free Trade agreement would actually be a Free Market Agreement and would impose Tariff's of varying degrees on any nation that did not conform to standards of government and individual liberty that mirrored our own as an incentive for them to have full membership and entry into the free market. This would include a very low level of government interference, control and regulation in the market...on both sides of the equation (ie. ours needs to be vastly reduced).

Such policy would protect the Free Market and keep it from being corrupted by nations wholly incompatable with the free market that took advantage of it without providing any benefit off freedom to their people (which would provide us with the benefit of a compatible market to trade in).

If a nation did conform, and if they practiced proven republican prinicples of government that allowed their people true liberty based on fundamental moral principle, then their access to our markets and our access to their markets would be open and principally subject to the true free market control.

But that access would have to work both ways, and the people there would have to truly be free to excel, to innovate and to raise themselves up in their own society...purchasing whatever our economy could provide for them while we did likewise.

IMHO, that's free trade as it should be, and it means free market trade between FREE nations...which enhances, grows and strengthens the free market, instead of watering it down, diluting and corrupting it which is what we are presently doing.

Such an agreement would not be offerred at all to nations who were the anti-thesis of those Republican principles.