[Mortimer Snavely]

Your questions are posited in a vacuum, ignoring the reality of the situation today. I'd agree with you on free trade within the free world, or what passes for the free world, but places like Japan, Red China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Korea play for power, and not for money. They practice doctrinaire National Socialism, and have abandoned military competiton for technological and economic competition as their chosen means of global domination. The banking systems are copies of the Reichsbank Act of 1942, for example. To countries like these, open US markets are a means to a political end, and are prohibited in their own countries. Free choice as practiced elsewhere is the precise thing they want to prevent from happening in their own countries.

[HighWheeler]

My questions get to the heart of freedom vs. fascism/socialism in the economy, to the exclusion of product, international politics, and international economics.

They are quite simple, and have nothing at all to do with "the situation today". They are applicable today, 226 years ago, and will be applicable in 226 more years. Question 3 and 6 also detect some level of economic knowledge of the answerer.

Since you won't answer my questions, I'll take up the slack here and answer yours, even though yours are laughibly complex for a Yes-or-No response. A person could write a whole book on any one of those questions to cover the myriad situations and the resulting dynamics.

Trade with our enemies? Generally yes. However only of course for product not restricted by US law, such as illicit drugs, and secret technology. The idea is that we are proportionately less likely to be attacked, and likely to create collaboration with any country with which we do business. They in effect would kill the golden goose by harming us. But if they have nothing to lose by attacking us, well then.....

The US is the economic superpower of the world because of our freedom. The more government intervention, the less freedom we have. The less freedom we have the less power we have. The other countries of the world continue to bear that out.