You're almost on the right track. You may find
this article interesting. I'm sure you've heard the same stories I have over and over again: manufacturing has gone downhill for the last 35 years, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have been stagnant for 35 years, families have increasingly needed 2 incomes instead of one, for the last 35 years, etc.
It begs the obvious question, what happened 35 years ago? We abandoned any pretense of being on the gold standard, that's what. Namely, the Bretton Woods agreement was abolished by an executive order from Nixon. A persistent trade imbalance and loss of manufacturing is one of the symptoms of our fiat currency system.
Read some of the articles at
www.fame.org and if you're still interested, you really need to read a book called
The Creature From Jekyll Island. Really, if you want to understand the relentless drive towards global socialism/new world order--the real motivations I mean, not the sensationalistic freemasons-meeting-in-a-smoky-room type stuff--you need to read this book. gop_jeff has read the book too if I remember correctly. You're probably yawning at the thought of reading a book on the history of american banking and currency, but it's actually fascinating and fairly easy to follow.
Having said that, free trade is a good thing. Not that NAFTA and similar agreements represent truly free trade of course. Still, if you want to look at what would happen if you cut off free trade, look at the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, passed in 1929. Supply-side economist Jude Waninski believes it is basically *the*
cause of the great depression. It devastated our economy, set off a wave of retaliatory tariffs by our former trading partners, and provided an even more fertile breeding ground for socialist regimes in europe, which ended in WWII. Or as Bastiat said,
if goods don't cross borders, armies will.
