As I have repeatedly shown, the Rising Tide school of economic thought always leaves out the fact that the rising tide must inevitably come at the expense of workers in the wealthier societies:
Branko Milanovic, a visiting professor at CUNY who once served as a senior economist at the World Bank, has tracked worldwide changes in income growth from 1998 to 2008. Milanovic calculates that the middle class in China and India experienced 60 to 70 percent income growth from 1998 to 2008, while growth stalled for the middle and working classes in the United States.
The question then becomes, in Milanovic’s words, “Does the growth of China and India take place on the back of the middle class in rich countries,” especially the United States? Milanovic does not claim a direct causal relationship, but contends that the two “may not be unrelated.”…
Entering the fray, three economists – David Autor of M.I.T., David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Spain, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego – have analyzed the employment consequences of globalized trade and technological advance.
In a series of papers they wrote together – “Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence,” “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” and “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets” — Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that in the case of trade with China, there are very painful consequences for specific categories of American workers.
Their findings show why voters are wary of free trade agreements.
Relative to the average employee in manufacturing, workers in industries that face stronger competition from imports “garner lower cumulative earnings and are at elevated risk of exiting the labor force and obtaining public disability benefits,” Autor, Dorn and Hanson write.
Continue reading the main storyAnd if manufacturers are ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 for exposure to import competition from China, between 1992 and 2007, workers in firms high on the exposure scale lost nearly half a year’s pay, compared to workers in firms at the low end of the scale.
And this doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that the expansion of domestic free trade into the international arena would INEVITABLY RESULT in the same sort of labor movement that one sees in the USA. Don’t like the fact that your kids live in a different state? Well, in a true free trade regime, they might have to go to Bangladesh or Peru to find employment.
Free trade is logically incompatible with national sovereignty, the Constitution, and the maximization of human liberty. This should be obvious, as it is an aspect of globalism and a major objective of those who advocate global government.