It isn't Fairtrade. It prevents protectionism. It's like a slave trade in a sense that, you have to do what Freetrade says, which means flooding and saturating and no protectionism or defense without violating Freetrade.
Is it fair trade when there are persons in other countries working for $2 a day, while everyone in your country is required to be paid minimum wage? Is it fair trade when all the factories in your country are required to abide by stringent pollution regulations that cost lots of money?
Free Trade is a myth. A dream for some people, a nightmare for others. But you should elaborate on your thread why you don't like Free Trade.
Free Trade would work a lot better if it was only between countries with similar standards of living relative to each other, but that's not where the majority of the trade is. Most international trade we see today is due to labor costs and regulations being a lot lower in one country than another. That's not really the sort of trade I think is a good thing.
Paying local populations for the fruits of their labour. Rather than free trade which dumps on to markets and undercuts the local population.
Other economic systems do exist outside of your EU centric, Free Trade taking for granted world view.
Free trade is when it is free or freely agreed upon by the 2 parties doing the trade. If one party has a comparative advantage that is natural and good. For example we don't want to grow our own bananas we want to buy them from someone who has a comparative advantage in growing them. Now do you understand?
You mean like not having minimum wage laws, or having much less stringent pollution regulations that are sparsely enforced.
If it's something like tropical fruit that only grows in a certain climate, which would be impractical and inherently costly to grow ourselves, I have no problem with trading for it.
it doesn't matter what it is, you always buy from the guy or country with the comparative advantage unless you want to get poorer rather than richer. 1+1=2. Econ 101- ever think of it???
yes, and??????????????? If china had our minimum wage they'd go bankrupt and starve to death. Ever think of Econ 101??
That's not a fact and you can't prove it. Comparative advantage is only one factor. A big factor, but still only part of the picture.
Your comment about quality is laughable, since obviously the countries we have trade imbalances with are notorious for having low quality. At least with the current situation it is all about price. No, obviously I do not think we should automatically buy from the country with the highest price. But we shouldn't necessarily automatically buy from the country with lowest price either. That's only one factor to consider. You're only looking at this from a microeconomic perspective, not a macroeconomic one. The fact that it makes more sense for an individual person to make a decision does not necessarily automatically transfer over into all those individual decisions being better for everyone making those individual decisions together. Are you familiar with the concept of the fallacy of composition ? It basically says the whole behaves differently than sum of its parts. US trading away their ASSETS
First of all Kaz, there's never been any such thing as a "free market", and secondly, even Trump works against it. Rather than letting the "free market" do its job and put an end to coal, Trump is interfering with the "free market" to try to keep collapsing coal going. Of course he is doing it for the campaign contributions.
And even with protectionism we are still free to buy from whomever, there is just a tax on it. Well, there is already a tax on everything we buy, so why does it matter if some things from a foreign country get taxed a little bit more than things from America? Do you think taxes on one thing are worse than taxes on another thing? Those taxes have to come from somewhere.
You don't seem to be connecting 2 and 2, james M. Let's go over this in our heads, shall we? The US has minimum wage law to protect workers, so one worker can't work for less and take the job away from another worker who demands more. China can't have that same high level of minimum wage, I'll agree with you there. And you can't see any reason not to put up some type of trade barrier with China????
no, Americas love the low prices from China. You want a barrier against low prices to impoverish Americans??