The greatest values of free trade policies inures to those who are able to seize and control the markets for high-value-added, non-commodity products. That means if your products are manufactured elsewhere the highest real value may be added to those products by the labor force that makes them. The highest increase in profits however may instead actually be realized by the importer with access to the market that will consume them at the highest price. The importer that brings them to a market depends on the financial health of that market for the value he adds. This fact explains why the impact of price deflation is now feared when it used to be one of the major points in favor of free trade. It is the more competitive market created by a free trade environment that finally benefits the consumer. Deflation will cause large losses in income to both producers and importers and the consumers will eventually suffer a loss of choices that may interrupt their buying patterns. These are relatively simple facts of macroeconomics. They have been forgotten in the wave of mergers and acquisitions that have restructured the world markets for goods and are now having an impact on the world market for services.

Efficiency of production has been enhanced by technological and teamwork advances over the past three generations to a huge degree. Costs of most necessary raw materials have also declined in real terms in most areas of the economy. Costs of transportation have been reduced to a level that reflects the volumes of goods and materials transported vast distances to markets with the money to absorb them. This is all highly artificial, and has been supported by treaties and trade policies that go far beyond anything history can demonstrate in opening borders and spreading goods around the globe. The art of freely trading owes immense respect to the progenitors of free trade in the pre-modern world, but it bears little resemblance to their experiences. Government has gone from being the enemy of free trade to the necessary arbiter of how that free trade will happen and who will profit from it. The modern economies of the world, Europe, the USA, Japan and a few others cannot exist without free trade in some form. The modernizing economies of the world will never grow without Free Trade. It is vital to the continued pursuit of peace between nations. But Free Trade is still mostly an art form and not yet a science. It is inevitable that we learn by making mistakes in such an environment.

One of the mistakes in perception that appears to be emerging is the idea that Free Trade is an absolute value in and of itself. It is an effective means of bringing markets and goods together but it is not absolutely the only way in which that can be done efficiently. The current nearly worshipful view of free markets themselves is an aberration. It is an artifact of the short period of time since the downfall of Communism's regulated market system. Market based economies are the best yet devised by human beings for efficiently managing the relationships between producers and consumers but they have flaws and problems. One of the big problems in free market economies is the distribution of wealth. Wealth tends to aggregate at the top in ways that cause social and political pressures that can alter the markets and their participants. Jobs that pay well alleviate this problem. Another is the issue of managing the monopolistic tendencies of dominant firms or the oligopolistic tendencies of powerful coalitions of groups like OPEC. Market regulation either happens through the offices of governmental agencies or through the activities of those firms able to fully or partially dominate the market into which they sell their product or service.
Markets can only really remain free as long as firm governmental regulation reduces the benefit of predatory action by several leading companies or a single dominant firm! Markets are a very complex interactive phenomenon. I suspect that free markets follow a natural development cycle from an initial state of wildly inefficient competition to monopolistic or oligopolistic dominance on a predictable curve. I have no way to test this thesis but the future generations of economic planners should be able to find a mechanism for clarifying this issue. Meanwhile the success of free markets will remain tied to the success of all participants on the buying side of the equation. If people have no job and no money their consumption capacity will be lost to the market.

The USA's middle class is the greatest job-based consumer market in the world. If we drain the resources from that vital group by reducing their opportunities for employment too drastically the world economy and free trade will inevitably suffer a great setback. Job losses must be reduced until sufficient new businesses can be created to employ those displaced by the exporting of jobs to other economies. The real need is for development of new technologies created here to be used as a stimulus for job creation in our economy first before they are exported to other nations. We are dangerously close to the point where the creation of new jobs in this economy will not occur because the use of workers abroad is always cheaper. That way lies chaos and economic destruction of the USA's middle class, one of the greatest productive forces ever assembled on this planet.

In the end it all comes down to the people, here and elsewhere in the world. What will they believe of our leadership if the job losses continue and accelerate still further? Their future is as tied to strength of the middle classes of the world as it is to their own employment opportunities. That is because their jobs will vanish if the middle classes in The USA and Europe are forced to stop buying by the insecurity of a jobless economy. It is the jobs and the income that they generate in the end on which the success of free markets will always be based. It is the jobs and the redistribution of wealth by that eminently fair means called wages that allow the wealthy to enjoy their wealth is a stable safe and secure society. And finally it is the jobs that offer the dignity of contribution and the sense of belonging to a worthy society to most of us in this world. God bless and keep you all safe in these jobless times.