> The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have.
This is untrue. I am very much a believer in individual rights as set forth in the decleration of independence, so on a philosophical level to an extent I agree, but the to say people in other countries have the same rights as a citizen of the empire is just silly.
> The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone.
This is at best a naive approach to what peace is in the reality of current machaviellian globalism. As Tacitus said: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
> The responsible thing to do is to do both.
Like when on an airplane in an emergency, you should put the ogygen on yourself first. To just ignore my point and say, "well, but it is better" doesn't address the issue. There are all kinds of complications with proping up third worlds, but I'll get to that in a second.
> (other commenter) Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point.
The point is that not only is this not true, but there are a vast array of costs being ignored. (when I say this isn't true, I have listened to plenty of pro-globalist/pro-free-traders talk about how America and other first world countries are just going to have to get used to the idea that their wealth is going to decrease as it equalizes out globally, of course what they don't say is that the elite a supranational and won't be affected for the most part)
So many people here seem to be pretending it's either complete free-trade, or complete isolationism, which not only isn't true, just proves my point that it is abused as a cudgel whenever the topic comes up, but doesn't stand up to any decent level of scrutiny, and is just a strawman fallacy. A great example of this is how the former British empire and later the American empire decided that that would rather have dictators they could influence and control rather than nationalists take power in the third world. Have you seen, in reality, what free trade has done in the case of Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic just for a small list of examples? Massive amounts of death and destruction, later papered over by dictators friendly to IMF and globalist corporations. This is what I mean when I quote Tacitus about them making a desert and calling it peace. More on the IMF, being a great example, promising to lift a people out of poverty, when in reality what they do is embroil a country into debt and servitude while corrupting the political and elite class into aquiscence. So the companies get what they want, the IMF gets what they want, and the elite of a country get rich... and the poor people continue to suffer...
but at least they got a few more jobs at the resulting factories so they could buy a few more cokes with their marginally higher chattel-like slave wages... and can now pretend to have exited third world status, despite the continued blowback from those "interventions" leaking onto the global stage. I've only touched on a handful in South America, but if we wanted to we could talk about Africa, or SE Asia, etc. who have all suffered similar fates.
I want to say can't believe this is the state of discourse on the topic, but I can. One of the things that woke me up about it is just this kind of response... how any even modicum of criticism of globalism and free-trade is met with a myriad of half-retorts and white-washing, while completely ignoring or mischaracterizing the valid at least for consideration arguments against it. I don't even have to get into details like the ~700k manufacturing jobs lost since the implimentation of NAFTA, or the trade good deficit chart since then to criticize these arguments, and citing some narrowly defined "law" such as comparative advantage that fails to take into account other factors doesn't change that. One just has to look at Mexico post-NAFTA to see how theory doesn't match reality.
Yall need to go read Smedley Butlers "War is a Racket", because make no mistake, globalistic free-trade as it exists today was built on a backbone of war, corruption, death and destruction. So think on that as you defend it.
Another Tacitus quote while I'm at it: "No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood."