If free trade ended, would it make this world a better place ?

Question

All I hear about is free trade is good because it keeps prices so low, but the people working over seas, only make like 30 cents a hour. Would ending free trade make America better, and force forighn countries to strive to be more like us ?

Answer 1

Depends if your a "have", No if you are a, "have not", Yes, yes and more yes, I only see the rich who are loyal to NO individual country benefiting from such activities. It is just like the tax system. Originally it was voted in place because it was sold to the public as a system to tax only the rich. However now it is the middle and poor who pay the price for this legislation. The wealthy however use these systems to their benefit. This is why the wealthy remain wealthy.

Answer 2

Absolutely not.

If a country can produce something more cheaply or better, it benefits the consumer. Instead of spending $200 on locally-produced shoes, you can spend $50 on foreign made shoes of the same quality (all things remaining equal). The remaining $150 can be spent on something else that probably would keep one of your countrymen employed. Besides, how many Americans want to work in factories these days?

The US is also an exporter. If you raise barriers, other countries will raise barriers to your goods, threatening American jobs.

Job growth is in innovation. Globalisation may have caused seamstresses to go out of work, but guess what - there still are jobs for fashion designers.

And the rest of the world wants to be affluent anyway (and not necessarily Americanised)

Answer 3

Free trade simply means you have the freedom to buy what you want to buy, regardless of where it was made. Restrictions on free trade mean that the government steps in, limits what you can buy, and forces you to spend more money on everything. How does that help you?

It doesn't. Lack of free trade absolutely makes the world worse off, not better.

And like said above, those foreign workers are working at those low-paying jobs because it is their best alternative. It won't help them to take away their job and leave them with no money at all. Free trade (not that we have perfectly free trade, but it's better than it might be) is always their best hope and has brought hundreds of millions of people in developing nations out of poverty in recent decades. You might notice that those poor foreign workers are not the ones going around picketing against free trade.

Answer 4

NO. Countries would have no reason to cooperate and would hate each other for all sorts of stupid reasons.
30 cents an hour is more than they were making before. Companies can not just go into a poor countries and start paying high wages. It would cause massive inflation and everyone in the country would suffer because of it.
If the jobs were worse than their previous situation, then they would not take them.

“When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.”
Frederic Bastiat
.

Answer 5

you gotta remember that before free trade and them making 30 cents an hour (... btw- in places like that a meal out for a family runs about 25 cents -50 cents- it's relative) they were mkaing nothing and starving to death. Ask the people who are now making a living what they think of it.

Answer 6

The world? No...they now depend on it. Look at the explosion in China and many 3rd world countries. Other countries would be plunged into a depression, including Mexico.

I think in time the US would be better off because our products and our labor would be the major commodities and we would be self-sufficient again.

Mike

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