I not saying that ending Free Trade would be a panacea but with jobs and money coming in we would have the means to solve those other problems. With jobs and money we could afford those higher prices. Without jobs and wealth creation we are dead in the water.
You missed my point.
I wasn’t defending some need to continue free trade.
Rather, I was proposing a reason the disaster of free trade was foisted on us and continues to be foisted on us.
Maybe this is a better way to say it:
They push free trade on us so they can print money with abandon and not cause inflation.
Real Free Trade has been practiced successfully for centuries on a bilateral or multilateral basis. It is trade between equal or nearly partners. Canada trading wood pulp to the United States for paper goods. Chile sending grapes to the United States in January and the United States sending grapes to Chile in July. Japan sending us automobiles and we sending them wheat.
The old British Commonwealth of Nations, Benelux, the European Community, and others were all highly successful examples of mutually beneficial free trade.
Like every other institution, the left and the crony capitalist GOP perverted it into Kool-Aid drinking free trade.
Mexico, which lacks basic sanitary standards, has no business being an equal trading partner with the United States, which requires them. China, where pollution and worker abuse are a way of doing business, has no business being treated as an equal trading partner like Japan, which has similar or even more stringent standards that the United States in these matters. Greece, where fiscal irresponsibility is the norm, has no business being treated the same as highly efficient Germany. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Free trade associations are only successful when practiced between member states with similar standards and values. Allowing an outsider into the group before they meet such standards is not going to make them magically adopt them, but it will make the collective weaker by adding more free riders.