NAFTA was Bill Clinton's greatest accomplishment and it needs to be further expanded.

You say: "NAFTA was Bill Clinton's greatest accomplishment and it needs to be further expanded." I say: NAFTA has been a disaster and should be abolished. Furthermore, Bill Clinton's greatest accomplishment as president was working with the Republican Congress to balance the federal budget and actually generate surpluses for many years. First, let's begin with NAFTA: The North American "Free Trade" Agreement is not about free trade. You say you're against protectionism, but that's what NAFTA is about. It isn't capitalist; it's mercantilist. The NAFTA treaty is several thousand pages long. REAL free trade could be accomplished unilaterally, by cutting tariffs to zero, abolishing all import quotas and restrictions, and eliminating all domestic subsidies. What NAFTA is really about is surrendering U.S. sovereignty. The agreement is filled with rules and regulations (not free trade!) which are enforced by North American Trade Commissioners. The purpose of NAFTA is to "level the playing field" of the three countries. But Adam Smith's doctrine tells us there's no need for this. We benefit from comparative advantage and division of labor. Tariffs and quotas, even if retaliatory, hurt the country imposing them as much as the target country. Furthermore, retaliatory trade restrictions inevitably ignite trade wars. Point being, there's no need for this "level playing field" agreement -- the free market and free trade work just fine. Who enforces these efforts to "level the playing field" -- the unelected NAFTA commissioners. What NAFTA really does is take away the constitutional authority of Congress to regulate trade and puts it in the hands of supranational bureaucrats. And what authority do these commissioners have? Well, they can levy fines on businesses, search the premises of business, and use American courts to enforce multinational labor or environmental regulations put into "law" not by the U.S. Congress, but by NAFTA commissioners. See Article 756 of NAFTA. It requires the three countries to "harmonize" their labor and environmental laws. True free trade, in the Smithian tradition, does not require this, and the fact that a supranational body can impose laws on American businesses and workers is deeply disturbing to anyone who cares about limited government. Elements of NAFTA also compel the U.S. to give foreign aid, and allow it to subsidize certain exports. Free trade? I think not. This is mercantilism at its worst. NAFTA is not free trade. All the arguments you make for it assume that it is. And NAFTA's effects have not been beneficial, either. Our trade deficit has soared even as the dollar has weakened against virtually every other major currency (including the Canadian dollar). This is largely the fault of fiat-money central banking more than NAFTA, but combining the two is bringing the destruction (and NOT of the "creative" variety) of this once prosperous nation. Worst of all, NAFTA directly led to the World Trade Organization (WTO), another World Government body that, again, is NOT about free trade. We go to the WTO to get sanctions placed on other countries and to get permission for higher subsidies, tariffs, and quotas. Refer back to Adam Smith's "absolute advantage" and David Ricardo's "comparative advantage" theories -- the basis for capitalist free trade -- to learn why this is the antithesis of capitalist free trade! Finally, I will close by saying that Bill Clinton's achievement of a balanced budget (with the help of a Republican Congress), and the subsequent surpluses that it caused, is by far his greatest achievement as president. Unfortunately, all the good that did was undone, in no small part, thanks to NAFTA.