Reason on NAFTA

More NAFTA

The Financial Times editorial board has joined the fray:

Trade policy has no effect on net employment: you can as easily have full employment, or chronic unemployment, under autarky as under free trade. The purpose of liberal trade is not to “create jobs” – the term is a badge of economic illiteracy – but to change the pattern of work and raise living standards overall.

Indeed.

Praise for Free Trade

Eduardo Porter writes:

Last week, tens of thousands of poor Mexican farmers marched down Mexico City’s fancy Paseo de la Reforma demanding that Nafta be reversed, their cows and donkeys occasionally taking a nibble from the grass along the median strip. Florida’s sugar barons sent their lobbyists to Capitol Hill.

This shared outrage underscores how egalitarian free trade is: undermining inefficient producers who survive behind protective barriers, be they fabulously wealthy sugar producers in Florida or campesinos on tiny plots in Michoacán.

Read the whole thing.