History shows this. Trade barriers are an idea long past their sell by date.
"They would be much more about making responsible for our buying behavior here at home"
Well, we'll need to tell consumers who depend on Walmart and CostCo that their buying behavior needs to change. We have benefited because of cheap imported goods. It's disingenuous for us to pretend we haven't.
These arguments are 30 years late. For all of 2016, the focus was on trade. While Donald Trump fusses about saving a couple hundred jobs here and there, self driving vehicles are on the horizon which will likely make millions of jobs redundant over the next decade. Where was the discussion on automation? Why wasn't a single automation question posed to the candidates? I have some ideas why and it makes me despair.
Yes, disgusting practices such as wage theft, sub living wages and exploitative practices that treat workers like indentured servants, still exist in the world and these realities vary region by region but the absence of a trade deal, even imperfect, doesn't improve this situation ( And despite that,
Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years). We should be reaching out more to the world, making it easier to trade, encouraging a lift in standards rather than going the protectionist route.
As for our wage stagnation problems, this doesn't have much to do with international trade but the teething pains of the shift to a modern economy, poor management practices, concentration of wealth at the top because of those practices in addition to high costs in healthcare and education.
Whether Trump and Bannon and the other nationalists like it or not, the world is getting smaller. Either we stamp our influence in meaningful ways, understanding we should never make perfect the enemy of good, or we become obsolete.
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