Kallog
Free international trade is a way of transferring money from rich countries to poor countries, evening out the differences. And everybody wins! Well there is one loser - national pride.
if it worked that way , but it doesnt.
look at the $19.00 product sold in wallmart that is produced in china.
from what I see , china gets a extremely small portion of the $19.00 and the american wallmart workers get just above minimum wage and wallmart tells its employees to apply for government assistance.
the only transfer of wealth is from the people in america who purchase the wallmart product to the owners of wallmart.
those who own wallmart take that $18.62 profit and build more wallmart stores and more factories in china and other countries where low wages can be found.
this only perpetuates the problem.
now lets look at it this way.
what if the chinese workers were paid $5.00 U.S. per hour.
just suppose it takes 1 hour for 1 employee to produce the product and the factory has 100 employees.
thats $500.00 an hour labor.
wallmart still makes $1,400 profit from the sale of the 100 products.
now suppose those 100 employees put 100 dollars an hour in the bank for 1 year , that would be 547,000 dollars a year in savings.
given that they still get to work 15 hours a day.
they still have $400.00 an hour to spend durring the year.
they will buy product after product and because they buy so many products those 100 employees can buy land , build factories , and work in the factories they now own.
or they can hire more employees at $5.00 per hour to ensure that the economy continues to sustain itself.
they would be building their own sustainable economy.
even if they reduced exports their economy would sustain itself.
and they could think of exports as extra income not as their prime source of income.
and as long as the rich in china dont horde all the profits the growth will continue.
I know its more complicated than that but you should understand that a sustainable economy depends on people spending money and if they dont have enought to spend then
the companies that hire them will eventually have to fire them.
here is a film about the year of leap forward
it was made in 1958.
was this before free trade?.
http://www.archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.643188 
