General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Without endorsing TPP, some things to consider about it. [View all]True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)is that they mobilize the underlying capital of an economy rather than keeping it fixed and then trading the output.
The justification for free trade is comparative advantage: The idea being that if a country isn't good at making one thing, it will reconfigure its productive capital to make something else.
But the way the global system works completely sabotages that. Instead of a country's capital reconfiguring, it's liquidated and the entire capital relocate to a lower-price region, with nothing replacing it.
That all already happened, and simply reversing it isn't practical. But right now the capital we lost is in China, and pretty much only China. So we have a chance to spread it out to more countries, which would make our own position stronger relative to each of them. And that would give some leverage to begin gathering capital back over time.