It was sold as "rising tide lifts all boats" (implication: boat = person, and "all" = "nearly all, at least") and "everyone benefits under free trade, trade bar

It was sold as "rising tide lifts all boats" (implication: boat = person, and "all" = "nearly all, at least") and "everyone benefits under free trade, trade barriers always make people worse off, it's just a fact, what don't you even know Ricardo?" Never mind that "all boats" was, in the best case, "all GDPs", not individual incomes, and "everyone" was... well, the average of all GDPs, actually, so also not actually every individual, and still with a pile of caveats for even that to be true. In point of fact nothing about all this said that even most people would benefit, if you either 1) applied common sense, or 2) actually looked at their sources. source: figured out the common sense reasons this was BS when I was in like 4th or 5th grade watching the China-MFN debate & vote on CSPAN (god I was a nerd); later did the reading and learned that yes, my elementary school intuition mapped closer to reality than the crap they sold us.