It’s interesting how liberals are now re-writing the history of NAFTA to frame it as some sort of utopian vision that was only promulgated by our selfless and kindhearted, gentle leaders and lamb-like corporate mandarins to save American jobs.

But I was there. I remember the fight over NAFTA’s passage. And it turns out that Ross Perot was pretty much right about it in every respect, despite his other flaws.

You simply cannot listen to mainstream economists about NAFTA. You just can’t. Their very salaries — their high-status positions in the mainstream of economics and academia — depend on not understanding or noticing its pernicious effects.

Disagreeing with experts is usually a fool’s game — but not if the experts have had their entire Weltanschauung distorted by years of propaganda, falsehoods and threat of loss of livelihood. Alas, this is exactly what the economics profession has experienced so it is completely compromised. It is worse than unreliable. Ninenty-nine percent of the time it is diametrically opposed to reality.

For instance, look at this guy (and most the others) in this piece at the NYT.

Smart people are absolutely the best at lying with statistics, rationalization and self-justification. Of course these people all benefited from NAFTA, as it did precisely what it was designed to do: funnel money from poor and middle-class people in the US and Mexico to the already well-off.

In that sense, NAFTA was a huge and resounding success.

It’s just completely unconscionable that even if you support NAFTA and argue that it it is a good thing (which is just delusional), that you feel you must frame it as something done by the elites for the benefit of the people. No, like most things, it was done by the elites for their own benefit.

Ross Perot was the only one of their class to have the gall to tell tell people what effects NAFTA would really have, and he was roundly punished for it.