With the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership dominating the headlines, now is a good time to revisit an old scam called “free trade.”
In 2003, Kevin Flanagan was an information technology employee at Bank of America. They told him he was being replaced with foreign labor, and he was ordered to train his replacement. After he completed his assignment, he was laid off. Then he went to the parking lot and shot himself.
That’s “free trade.”
Like The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, sometimes, the most effective way to lie is to use the most innocent words. No word is more susceptible to propaganda-leveraging than “freedom.” Attach that word to any concept, and all of a sudden, it’s unassailable. That’s exactly what happened with “free trade.”
Proponents of free trade will often use the simplest analogies to convey their point, as if you were retarded. The reason they have to resort to such caveman illustrations is because free trade does not exist in the real world. There is no such thing as equality of bargaining power. If someone has ten million dollars and you have zero dollars, anything above zero is an “improvement” in your situation. The free trade economists will say this person with zero dollars is “free” to work for $1 per hour, and they will do so because it improves their situation. This is what “freedom” means to free trade economists.