Mike O'Mara wrote: MO) whether trade with slave owners (or countries that are so unfree that their citizens are virtually slaves), is really "free trade". (MO
We'll just have to agree to disagree over how much the labor price advantages of America's trade partners are due to anything remotely resembling chattel slavery. I suspect this particular provision of the DFC platform has more to due with demands for rent-seeking protections by traditional Democratic Party constituencies, than with concern for the lack of freedom of workers abroad. Those deficiencies of freedom are intimately bound up with the intitutional foundations of total planetry wealth, which was the focus of a 2005 World Bank study I discuss here: http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/institutional-foundations-of-total.html. Protectionism is one of the best ways to discourage those institutions from developing. For more information, see Does Globalization Increase Child Labor? Evidence from Vietnam (NBER Working <http://papers.nber.org/papers/w8760> Paper No. 8760). See also Paul Krugman's classic "Ricardo's Difficult Idea": http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html. Whether free trade is good for workers in developing countries is not really debated any more by academic economists of any ideological persuasion. Brian Holtz 2006-2008 LP Platform Committee
