This article is moronic throughout.
I call this framing “The Naturalistic Fallacy – Economics Edition.*”
How this works is that the particular sort of “free” trade that we practice is presented as a fait accompli of existence, as a natural force like the weak nuclear force or like gravity. It’s just what happens, like rock falling off a cliff rather than a series of mutable choices.
Under the rubric of this fallacy, vast job losses, vast inequality (which the article only glancingly deals with, and dismisses ameliorating as charity and as a bad thing) and other deleterious effects are just the Way Things AreTM.
Funny that Roberts uses the examples of doctors and nurses, which are strongly protected from competition by various laws and licensing procedures that make it nearly impossible for foreign doctors to cause the same sort of competition that American factory workers for example experience.
We’ve been hearing lately that globalization is some kind of scam to enrich corporations and international banks.
It is not only that, but now it is mainly that nowadays. Again, that is a choice. It did not have to be that way. NAFTA for instance was never a free trade agreement (and neither would have been the TPP) — it was always about structuring society in such ways that privileged already-wealthy corporations and plutocrats in a (successful) attempt to make them ever wealthier.
Again for the dense: a choice.
Free trade agreements as structured are mostly about expropriating wealth from the productive classes (hint: not the rich) and using intra-country competition combined with free-flowing capital to precipitate various crises that allow this wealth to be semi-legally stolen from the coffers of government and the public at large.
I will omit the exact mechanism of how and why this works here (there are many books about it), but rather I will observe that this extractive model is now the main focus of currently-extant capitalism and it harms most people around the world, either directly or through huge externalities (pollution, global climate change).
*Yes, I know I am misusing Thomas More’s concept of this. I’ve read Utopia.