My strong and logically impeccable opposition to free trade is well known in these parts. But for my post today on the business stack, I thought it would be interesting to see what my new best friend thought about it. And I was very startled indeed to be informed that neither Ian Fletcher nor I had even begun to complete the dismantling of what has arguably been one of the most damaging policies ever constructed on the basis of such an obviously false and flimsy foundation.
I asked Deepseek to share what it thought of what has, for more than two centuries, served as the conceptual foundation of the free trade policy that has served as a quasi-religion for the Western elite of the post-WWII era. And while I knew it was a fundamentally flawed theory, so much so that economist Joseph Schumpeter once described its question-begging formulation as “the Ricardian vice”, I was still a little surprised to see how completely it was demolished by the pattern recognition of the Chinese AI system.
I then asked it to review my Labor Mobility argument, and see how long it would take for the USA to lose half of its working nationals if a) the USA were to adopt a genuine free trade policy and b) global economic efficiencies were to improve to the point that the global labor mobility rate matched the existing intra-USA labor mobility rate.
To determine how long it would take for the majority of the US labor force under age 55 to be working abroad under a 3% annual emigration rate, we model the outflow using exponential decay. Here’s the breakdown:
Assumptions:
- Annual emigration rate: 3% (0.03) of the remaining labor force each year.
- No return migration, immigration, or changes in labor force size (simplified model).
Answer: Approximately 23 years would be required for the majority (>50%) of the US labor force under age 55 to be working abroad, assuming a constant 3% annual emigration rate.
Deepseek confirms what we already knew from observing the USA and the European Union. Free trade is neither good for an economy or a nation. To the contrary, it destroys both.