The Debate over NAFTA

Recently in the Democratic presidential contest the two nominees, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been debating NAFTA. For you who do not know NAFTA stands for the North America Free Trade Agreement. I want to discuss this from a perspective that we never see in the news or from most politicians.

The idea that a nation’s government should in any aspect, other than national security, have to “agree” with another nation’s government to allow free trade should only exist in Communist countries.. Free countries, such as America, should allow individuals and companies to trade with whomever they want to trade with unless it puts the nation at military risk. This should be the end of the issue. If we justify the United States Government legalizing free trade we are in fact saying that they also have the power to take away our right to trade with other humans. It is not the United States government trading with another country. It is a privately owned business that is trading with a privately owned business from another country. Government should not be involved at all. This is why NAFTA should not have to be law to begin with. Allow me to address the economics of the issue now.

If a trade is unfair that trade will not take place unless the individual is coerced into making the trade. The idea that Obama and Clinton should be allowed to restrict us to trade with anyone is ridiculous and totalitarian. They and others such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs would argue that jobs are lost when we have free trade. That is true. Jobs are ALSO lost when we restrict free trade. It is funny how those jobs and the new jobs that are created from new trade are never talked about in our liberal media or by Democrats. When we allow free trade, jobs that are low paying and typically low skill are lost. Why would a country desire to keep those to begin with? Would we as a country not rather have higher paying service jobs that are performed in air conditioned buildings? Keep in mind that at one time most Americans farmed. Millions of farming jobs have been lost in this country since trade and technological advancement have taken place. Do we argue that our country is worse off becaues of it? Should we stop new technologies from being created to save those farming jobs? Today many of our jobs use little physical effort and thus we have to build fitness gyms every ten square miles in this country just to stay a little healthy. Do you think that any woman in the early 1900's ever thought "I can not wait to pass my sewing machine down to my grandchild"? In fact the American dream was to allow your child to get an education so that they could perform the better jobs of the future. Today we have politicians and liberals all over this country saying that we need to restrict human freedoms so that we can keep these low paying jobs for people who choose not to better educate themselves or improve their skills so that they can work better paying and higher skilled jobs. Yet ignorant Americans think these politicians know best?

I find it amusing how liberals are disgusted at companies who "take advantage" of cheap labor oversees and how it is immoral to build so called "sweat shops" in poor countries becaue it hurts those individuals, and out of the next breath brag about them restricting trade so that those jobs are saved and Americans will be able to continue working in those same awful "sweat shops." Are we so ignorant that we do not see the hypocracy?