There are certain issues that Free Traders always avoid discussing. [View all]

[Zalatix]

Bring up these points and watch how the discussion gets miraculously taken off-topic!

1) One major and fatal problem with offshoring is that the "poor nations of the world" rely on taking American jobs and exporting goods to us, for their prosperity.

America's offshoring-driven unemployment will catch up with us and drag our currency OR our core economy down long before the poor nations of the world become self-sustaining. America will dry up as an export market before they can service their own economies. And China, for instance, is not self-sustaining. If their exports to us dry up any time in the next 10 years, their economy will go to hell.

Finally, eventually America will eventually run out of jobs to ship offshore. And that will also spell doom for the poor nations of the world who export to us.

Offshoring discriminates against American workers. Globalism prevents American workers from having access to foreign job markets, while enabling others to poach on ours This vampire economy cannot sustain itself; eventually the victim runs out of blood. Free traders cannot and will not address this because past that point, there is no future for the third world.

2) For free trade to even exist, one nation has to stay dirt poor so that importing from them is cheaper than producing those goods domestically. That's why, for instance, the United States tried to stop Haiti's government from giving their textile workers raises[/url: higher wages for Haitians meant more expensive clothes for America.

Ask your neighborhood free trader about that. How do they like their government keeping poor people's wages in the gutter so they can have their cheap clothes? Oh but they're helping the poor people of the world, right? Again, notice how the subject gets changed when you bring this up.

3) There's an even bigger problem to be looked at as well - and the free trade crowd won't even dare come near this. At the rate that the third world is polluting itself and crapping in its own food plate to produce goods for America, it won't even matter if they become self-sustaining. They will choke on their pollution. China has a drinking water crisis that America's media won't talk about, and it's caused by their industrial pollution. India has the same problem. In fact, the free trade movement is DESTROYING THE THIRD WORLD by doing absolutely nothing about the fact that America is exporting its heavy pollution overseas. Ever wonder why the globalism crowd never discusses this, or detours around it?

They detour around it because the solution is to force those nations to clean up their environmental act. Free traders detour around the environmental effects of offshoring because to clean up the mess overseas would make manufacturing goods overseas so expensive that offshoring would disappear. Cleaning up the environment at an offshore factory would cost the "poor people" their jobs. But failing to do so, is killing them.

4) I think that you the gentlereader can take it from here about human rights abroad. You know what safe workplaces, real democracy, and workers' rights do to the cost of imports. It drives it all upward. Byebye cheap shoes and iPads. Remember, the free traders are all about "but it'll raise prices for Americans and we can't have that". Again, notice how the conversation gets diverted when you bring this up.



What the third world needs, in order to become self-sustaining, is first world wages, and first world environmental protection standards. But they will not get that. Why? Because America wants its cheap stuff. The free traders want their cheap stuff. And to get their cheap stuff we must have foreign poor people working for crap wages in cities that are rapidly outranking American cities in the terms of who has the worst pollution levels.

One has to ask the free traders... what are they really advocating for? The well-being of the world's poor... or their own entitlement to the lowest-price clothes and consumer electronics?