“Free Trade” Is Anything But Free, China Passes U.S As Worlds Largest Economy (Videos)

By Josey Wales

“Free trade” sounds nice, but it is certainly not “free” for the United States. In actuality the practice has wrought havoc on the American economy.

It appears as though our leaders are either apathetic or clueless when it comes to the United States’ involvement with free trade agreements (FTAs). In fact, “free trade” lines the pockets and ambitions of CEOs and politicians while shipping American jobs overseas.

Free trade means unprotected, uncontrolled, unrestricted access to our economy for any country with the lowest price on any product, tariff- and duty-free. We cannot compete with these wages and prices, which forces our companies to outsource their manufacturing, to the detriment of American workers.

We are now relegated to a service (servant) economy, with rising unemployment.

The U.S. is no longer a strong, wealth-producing, independent nation. To regain our superpower status we must produce American jobs and the components for those jobs. We must create and keep the technology. We need to work for ourselves and for our benefit, and we are not doing this.

China passes U.S. as largest economy.

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.

This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.

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