"Free Trade" is a SCAM. It always has been.

[Jim Lane]

3. Not always. Only in the last few decades.

At one time, consumers worldwide were hurt by protective tariffs, which rich business owners succeeded in getting imposed so as to protect themselves from foreign competition. The real meaning of "free trade" is to lessen or remove tariffs, along with nontariff requirements that have the same purpose and effect (i.e., they're not genuinely intended to protect consumers or the environment or the like, but were solely to benefit domestic corporations). This lessening of tariffs was a valid goal. For example, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 triggered retaliation by our trading partners, leaving everyone worse off. FDR campaigned on opposition to high tariffs and succeeded in beginning the process of mutual lowering of tariffs.

The problem with the "free trade" slogan is that this valid goal was largely achieved in the decades after World War II, under the aegis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The more recent trade agreements haven't lowered unreasonably high tariff barriers because there are few left to lower. In the TPP, for example, only a small portion of the text is devoted to tariffs. The rest is the stuff like Investor-State Dispute Settlement, which has nothing to do with tariffs and everything to do with empowering multinational corporations to override democratically enacted laws. This is not "free trade" in any meaningful sense. Instead, the TPP and similar agreements are referred to by their proponents as "free trade agreements" because they want to capitalize on the favorable connotations of that phrase, even though it's unjustified in this context.