> "Free trade is clearly good" This statement reveals one of the larger problems in US culture: using profitability as he primary (or only) metric when judging

> "Free trade is clearly good" This statement reveals one of the larger problems in US culture: using profitability as he primary (or only) metric when judging social, political, or cultural issues. One of the best descriptions of this problem was David Simon's talk[1] from a few years ago, which I highly recommend. And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. [...] [...] the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximize profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not? The thing we call "free trade"[2] has clearly helped profits in the US, but "profit" is only one aspect that needs to be considered when evaluating if something has been "good" to a society. As you pointed out, we have had several decades of policies that were very effective at creating profit by razing the demand side of the market. A proper evaluation would have included other concerns like preserving demand and investing in less-obviously-profitable things like education. As a result of this myopia - combined with the gradual destruction of social safety nets - we are now starting to see what happens when people start to lose faith in society. This causes people to start looking for "someone else" to fix these problems. So now we see fascism rising to try to capture some of that unrest. This is going to turn violent a lot faster than most people expect if we allow the status quo to continue. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZOH9DgzTCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZOH9DgzTCs http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap... [2] The policies pushed by the big treaties are just as much about adding barriers-to-entry and removing regulation (often called "standardizing" or similar newspeak; the canonical example is credit card companies racing into Delaware to exploit the local laws and the "free (interstate) trade" of credit.