By Curtis Ellis:
For decades, the leaders of both parties and all of academia told us free trade was an unalloyed good. The question was considered settled a long time ago, when Al Gore evoked the ghosts of Smoot and Hawley to debate NAFTA with Ross Perot on Larry King Live.
We didn’t need to think about this free trade nonsense any longer, the smart people told us. Everyone benefits in the long run, they said, forgetting John Maynard Keynes’ famous words: In the long run we are all dead.
Now, vast reaches of the American middle class are all but dead, on life support mechanisms of unsustainable debt.
China Has Broken Its Promises
A corollary of the axiomatic belief in free trade held that trade with China was wholly positive. China would grow more prosperous, it’s politics and economy would be akin to a suburb of Chicago if not Scandinavia, and a billion and a half new customers would buy everything we make.
Of course, none of that happened. Instead of China buying everything we make, they make everything we buy. Instead of China becoming more democratic, they are using their economic power to export techno-totalitarianism and spiritual and mental enslavement with Chinese characteristics.
Not only did Western corporations, including those headquartered in the United States, willingly fall in line, but the foreign policy mavens also continued to cling to the fiction that everything was OK with “constructive engagement.”
Read more: American Greatness
