Including Everyone

BY NOW IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS to just about anyone; free trade, and this big high rolling global economy we now have, has its up side, and its down side. Its mostly good, one might think, because free international trade enhances prosperity by creating larger markets and makes goods and services more competitive and cheaper for the average consumer. Unfortunately, all this has heretofore been accomplished with pain and suffering to the working, non-ownership class, in terms of job loss through dislocation, and wage depression through expanded labor pools.. But throwing out the baby with the bath water, like Bernie Sanders and others suggest, might not be the answer. Obviously, in economics, one size does not fit all. Tariff and trade reform must be highly targeted; not all goods and services should be subject to the same regulation. In general, small, young, yet-to-be secure and established industries need tariff protection, large, successful, long standing businesses do not. This fact of nature complicates everything, enormously. It makes trade negotiations more difficult with an endless list of specifics and exceptions to rules, and enforcement more difficult. When, oh when, will the wealthy ever learn that ultimately, you expand markets by getting disposable income into the hands of people who therefore had it not. New consumers equal bigger markets, and we can't just sit back and rely on the free market and population growth to achieve this. Economic prosperity for all (on the planet) can be achieved through reason, and dare we say it - planning; the blind, invisible hand of the free market can only do so much, and lest we forget, the theory of free market capitalism bases its success on the notion that people behave rationally, in their own best interests, and when's the last time you saw anything like that happening? That is, unless you actually believe that allowing yourself to become fifty pounds overweight, smoking, drinking, tail gating on the highway, and spilling poisons into the atmosphere are fine examples of human beings behaving rationally, in their own best interests.