answer:Free trade bases all wealth from foreign trade. It does not want to increase domestic commerce. It has industries for export that take advantage of third world nations.They call that comparative advantage. The role of international corporations in trade has increased as never before. International corporations do not want to increase domestic commerce.They just want more markets. They do not mind having armies of non consumers. Yet they think global warming is a problem. They do not think that higher living standards will defeat the war on poverty.
We cannot just talk about what free trade does. We need to discuss free trade and what it is responsible for. I have mentioned some things. However there is Nixon destroying the fixed exchanged system, the Bretton Woods. Free Traders do not want a fixed exchange system. They killed Glass Steagall. Free traders gave us never ending wars and regime change wars, this is free trade thought. President Obama telling African students that if they get higher living the world would boil up. Thus saying you all cannot have a high standard of living it will endanger the planet. Free trade thought gave us the wages fund theory, the over population theory and the land theory which America’s greatest economist Henry Carey refuted.
Free trade thought is essentially laissez faire it cannot be quickly labeled as capitalism. This is not economics for dummies. Free trade is more diabolical. People who use the word capitalism give the British no credit for the carnage they have done to civilization. Capitalism the people who say it so much they sound like a record player. They do not mention the crimes of British System economists. It could be because they like them.
>Define “harm”. Define “good”. Global free trade has done many things. As the name implies, it moves us towards weaker national economies and a stronger global economy, until all nations equalize. If you only take a national view, you would agree with what the USA and South Korea and Japan and Germany and other industrial nations did to build a powerful economy, make up reasons to exclude anything done better by another country until your country does it just as well.
First of all, the question is biased. Usually globalization benefits more people. Because of global free trade, all consumers can buy/afford cheaper goods. Globalization extends division of labor internationally, which cuts the cost of products(not necessarily by increasing productivity) because of Comparative advantage.
With lower cost, higher profits and outsourcing, globalization helps developed countries’ capital profitability, industry structure, innovation and environment. At the same time, it helps under development countries gain more jobs for their workers.
I’ve worked in the customs biz for almost 5 decades. I was there when the H.S. tariff came to Canada. I carried the last typewriter out of the office and crawled through walls to wire the office for it’s first computers.
I’ve watched many free trade agreements negotiated and enacted. I’ve actually read some of them. I’ve taught courses to brokers on NAFTA.
I know there is no such thing as free trade if free trade means trade without any barriers. I want there to be regulations on drugs and high health standards for food, especially processed food. I wan … (more)
2 comments from Richard Dixon and more
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Graham Paterson, Economics needs to focus on the bottom end and thus benefit the top end.
Answered July 10, 2018
The reason is because the intention was always to destroy national independence and self suffeciency. Robert McNamara made that quite clear when he was President of the World Bank between nineteen sixty-eight and nineteen eighty-one. McNamara upgraded the rules of globalisation by officially redrafting them as "Structural Readjustment". Those rules are divided into two groups:
Note that many of the answers here make the correct distinction between actual free trade, which is just people choosing with whom to trade for what and in what quantity, for an agreed upon price, and the more common “managed trade”, which is commonly (and deliberately) misnamed “free trade deals”.
