The fallacy of free trade

Free trade. I'm sure you've heard about it. It's the process whereby goods aren't taxed when they move from country to country. It sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? Free things are good, so free trade must be good, right?\nWrong.\nThe problem with free trade is that it isn't really free. Until and unless we live in a perfect world, free trade will hurt the economies of countries like the U.S. As I said, in a perfect world, free trade is a workable theory. So is communism. But, just as the Soviet experiment and Olympic pairs ice skating have proven, we don't live in a perfect world.\nInstead, we live in a world in which labor and environmental standards vary from country to country. A world in which a job pays $20 per hour in America but pays less than $2 per hour in other countries. This is our world, and these inequities lead to the fallacy of free trade.\nA great example of the failure of free trade is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Proponents of the 1993 agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada believe free trade will lead to economic benefits for all involved. Unfortunately, these economic benefits have turned out to be nothing more than an apparition.\nMore than 750,000 American jobs and job opportunities have been lost since NAFTA's enactment, according to the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrialized Organizations. What's more, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico has gone from $9 billion pre-NAFTA to an astronomical $74 billion in 2000. This means the United States is consuming far more than it is producing and that a large percentage of the products that Americans are buying were produced outside of the United States, leading to fewer manufacturing jobs.\nIn Bloomington, workers at Thompson Consumer Electronics, General Electric and Otis Elevator lost their jobs when factories moved to Mexico. Corporations will almost always go to underdeveloped countries where labor is cheaper. Many free trade proponents believed that NAFTA would bring Mexico economic prosperity. However, they don't give enough credit to the greedy American corporations.\nInstead of creating high quality jobs in Mexico, U.S. corporations have developed maquiladoras. Maquiladoras are foreign owned assembly plants located on the U.S. border and produce 47 percent of Mexico's exports, according to the AFL-CIO. The same organization reports that a worker employed at a maquiladora makes an average of $1.74 per hour for the same job that would earn more than $19 in the United States. This is because the job goes to the person who is willing to work for the least amount of money. What's more, the Economic Policy Institute reports that these factories aren't helping the Mexican economy because they are isolated from the rest of the country, and they have, in fact, led to a decrease in the percentage of stable jobs in Mexico. So, in accordance with the fallacy of free trade, not only are high quality American jobs being lost, but extremely low quality jobs are filling the void.\nThese glaring problems are only the tip of the iceberg. If you delve further into this troubling situation, you will find that free trade allows the rich to get richer at the expense of others. One can only hope that the U.S. government will wise up and recognize how many Americans have been hurt by the fallacy of free trade.