Well said, dx.

Nirmal,

I'm new here and I liked your analysis on free trade. What you appear to be doing is analyzing how people's attitudes about "free trade" affect how they vote.

The problem I see regarding this is that mainstream discussions and the general public's understanding of what free trade means are dominated by the belief that "free trade" actually means free trade. However, that is not the case.

Economics PHD Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net/) has a lot to say about that. He rightly refers to the the "neo-liberal trade agenda" as opposed to "free trade". Here is an excerpt from and a link to an interview he gave recently to Truthout.org correspondent Leslie Thatcher:

What Was Actually Happening While You Led a Life
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012208B.shtml

It is essential that people recognize that the wealthy didn't just get ahead through talent, hard work, and luck - they got ahead by rigging the deck. The rich have written the rules so that they will be the winners; we have to make this as clear as we can and point out all the ways in which it is done.

Economists are incredibly complicit in the effort to conceal how the rules have been rigged. The most obvious case is with the neo-liberal trade agenda. This agenda is routinely dubbed "free trade" and those who oppose the agenda are called names (most often "protectionist," but it can get worse). This is one of the few areas of public policy where it is absolutely the norm to use ad hominem arguments against your opponents.

Of course, the proponents of this trade agenda are not in support of free trade, they want selective protectionism. They want to subject the broad segment of working population to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, but they insist on maintaining protections that sustain high wages for doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, and other highly paid professions. The predicted and actual result of this policy is to redistribute income upward (that is what standard economic theory shows), but economists do their best to conceal the nature of our trade policy and call people names if they don't support it.

Anyhow, this is just one of many examples, but people have to realize that they are being ripped off. It is not the natural workings of the market that makes life difficult for them; it is rich people rigging the rules for their own benefit.