The United States should have a general policy of free trade.

Pro argues that a survey of "83 responders" in 2006 is evidence that free trade is agreed to by the majority. But Pro's sample is unrepresentative and outdated. In March 2012, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik writes that, in "real surveys with representative samples," "respondents favor trade restrictions by a two-to-one margin." [7]Pro sometimes argues against particular protections. But to the few arguments I made for protections, Pro offers no counter. Pro does not even mention my argument for balancing trade via Buffet's "import certificates."Peace and Human RightsWar is waged regardless of trade policy, usually on ideological grounds. Britain has fought more wars than any other nation, sometimes openly with the aim of imposing free trade on reluctant nations (that's how Hong Kong became British). Post-WWII Japan has been blatantly protectionist, but has had a more peaceful foreign policy than free trading America. The U.S. is also the biggest terrorist target, regardless of its free trade policy.In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein exposes free trade and its relation to human rights violation. Besides some obvious examples like South Africa and China, she provides the US-backed Pinochet regime in Chile: by the early 80s, the Milton Friedman-prescribed policies had led to a huge “crisis of corruption,” “rapid de-industrialization, a tendfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns.” The only way to keep free trade going was human rights abuse.Comparative AdvantagePro claims that "progress of all types leads to displacements," and that "lost jobs" from free trade are simply the displacement of "jobs to competitive industries."Pro's reasoning is dubious. Pro assumes workers can move easily between industries. If they can't, imports won't push a nation's economy into industries better suited to its comparative advantage. Instead, imports will just kill off existing industries and leave nothing in its place. There are workers without the right skills or who don't live in the right place to move between industries -- those will be left unemployed.The problem is compounded because of relatively low minimum wage and hire-and-fire labor laws in the United States. As a result, we often see a decline not only in the quantity of jobs but in the quality of jobs. We see $28 an hour ex-autoworkers making $8 at a video rental store. Economist Robert Skidelsky argues that this is what happened in Russia: "about one million scientists have moved into non-intellectual occupations since 1991." [8] In Moscow, there were physics PhD's who were driving taxis. The human cost is obvious, but there is an economic one as well: when skills that cost money to acquire (for example, physics) are never used again, the economy negates large investments in human capital.These losses put the whole economy at risk. As Yale economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin famously put it, "it takes a heap of Harberger triangles to fill an Okun gap." A Harberger triangle is the area in a supply and demand diagram that measures the loss of taxation (plainly, these are the benefits of free trade). An Okun gap is the loss in output and employment when the economy falls below potential. Tobin's point is that the benefits of free trade are small compared to the huge cost of not running our economy at full capacity due to imports and lost jobs.Trade DeficitsPro admits that trade deficits are bad. Pro also concedes the results of studies proving the possibility of a better U.S. economy if we end deficit trading. Pro insists trade deficits are not related to free trade, and completely ignores the fact that free trade allows deficit trading to happen in the first place. Let me go through the logic step-by-step: 1) Nations engage in trade2) One cannot get goods for free3) When the value of imports is not covered by the value of exports, nations must make up the difference by sellling their assets or assuming debt.4) Free trade allows trade deficits.The correct trade policy is to end free trade by pragmatically balancing trade. If the United States adopts a policy of free trade, then government allows deficit trading. Pro agrees the consequences of deficit trading are unacceptable. Pro understands that, when a nation exhausts its ability to sell assets and assume debt, it ends up poorer than it would have been if it had not had free trade to begin with. The U.S. prefers short-term consumption as opposed to long-term variety. Americans consume more than they produce, maximizing imports by assuming debt and selling assets. The evidence is not subtle, including a staggering net foreign ownership of $3.5 trillion in American assets and an ever-increasing debt.Pro claims the federal deficit is independent of trade deficit. No. When trade deficits produce debt, the U.S. pays interest on that debt, which is calculated as part of the federal deficit. Pro argues that our trade deficit is a savings problem in disguise. Pro misunderstands the hard economics, and assumes that the arithmetic relationship between trade deficits and saving rates is a causal one. In national income accounting, our savings are the excess of our production over our consumption. Trade deficits are the exact opposite, occurring when we consume more than we produce. We can see clearly that saving rates and trade deficits are exactly the same thing expressed in a different way. There is no causal relation between the two. The decision to eat a cookie does not cause the decision to not save the cookie -- it is the same decision. ExternalitiesFree trade cannot account for negative and positive externalities. Because environmental damage is not factored into equations, free trade encourages pollution when it offers a cost advantage. There are other externalities like technological spillover. Pro offers no response.CompetitionPro claims that non-competitive industries will be discontinued in favor of "high-tech" competitive industries. It turns out that airlines, which are Pro's single well-chosen example, is the only "high-tech" good the U.S. is a net exporter of. [9] The U.S. is a net importer of every other high-tech good, including spacecraft. This raises the question of where the jobs have gone? Pro does not give any evidence of new jobs or increased income from free trade. How can the U.S. cover the cost of imports? There are three options: increasing the price of exports, selling assets, or borrowing on credit. The first dramatically raises the price of domestic goods; the other two produce a trade deficit. Either way, consumers and workers lose. Income InequalityPro misunderstands the Stolper-Samuelson theorem and its results. It says that, as a result of free trade, people who draw most of their income from returns on capital (the rich) gain, while people who get most of their income from labor (the rest of us) lose. Because the U.S. has more capital per person, and fewer workers per dollar capital than the rest of the world, free trade tends to hurt American workers. For skilled jobs, foreign labor is just as expensive as American labor, so there is no impact on American wages. The occupations that suffer are those whose products are easily produced by cheap labor abroad. This includes most blue-collar jobs, which accounts for the majority of U.S. workers. This means that even if free trade performs in other respects (it doesn't), it would still leave most Americans with lower incomes. And even if it increased our economy overall (it doesn't), it would still unfairly increase poverty and income inequality.EvidencePro claims I have no evidence. Besides other examples like Chile, take Pro's example of Brazil: from 1987 to 2005, it was found that trade liberalization contributed to poverty and inequality in urban areas where the rich now live side-by-side with Third World squalor. [10][7] http://tinyurl.com... [8] http://tinyurl.com... [9] http://tinyurl.com... [10] http://tinyurl.com...