Most of society’s members are devastated, losing income, savings, security, health benefits, self-respect and more. Most people end up working longer and harder on an endless economic treadmill in a desperate attempt to better themselves. Yet the free trade lobby dismisses these real criticisms as apocryphal stories or, at best, myths reassuring you and comforting themselves by pointing to the “real” increase in mean income (or as it is often phrased an increase in “living standards”).

Only one of the elite, the entrepreneur is clearly better off and his success is, at best, temporary. What the entrepreneurial tycoons forget is that society’s consumers and workers are the same people! When you destroy one you end up destroying both!!! Thus, eventually, the consumer markets will dry up and no one will be able to buy the entrepreneur’s products. Consequently the entrepreneur’s income must necessarily also shrivel away.

In the end nobody benefits. This is a classic example of the “tragedy of the commons“. A tragedy because we did it to ourselves. Everyone’s actions are reasonable individually but collectively an important resource is ruined (in our example it is society’s industrial base among other things). We killed the goose in order to get the gold and now we have neither.

 I can give more examples but Dr. Batra in his seminal book “The Myth of Free Trade: The Pooring of America” does a better and more effective job of exposing the deceit spread by the misuse of aggregate data in support of laissez-faire free trade. A deceit that is all the more insidious because because it is often spread by “true believers” who have been brainwashed into believing the “truth’ about free trade and who cannot or will not take the time to examine the facts or are willing to admit they could be wrong but for the rest of us, like the emperor’s new clothes, we can now see just how big a con laissez-faire free trade is.

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Tags: Economics, free trade, politics

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