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Modern nation can't escape international trade

Freer trade has taken an unwarranted beating in this presidential race.

Freer international trade undoubtedly produces winners and losers, but so does business in any free market economy - even ones that limit foreign competition. Dynamic, competitive economies generate better, faster, cheaper ways to produce and deliver products and services that displace workers.

In 1900, about 40 percent of all American jobs were related to agriculture; today only about 2 percent are and we're a major food exporter. What also happened to all those buggy-whip and typewriter manufacturing jobs, or the telephone switchboard operators, or bank tellers, or elevator operators?

Trade is a convenient scapegoat for our economic malaise because its victims - those who lose their jobs to imported goods and services - are concentrated and highly visible while those who benefit from it - consumers who in the aggregate save huge amounts and employees who work at exporting companies - are dispersed and almost invisible.

A truthful politician (an oxymoron, I know) would recognize the overall societal and geopolitical benefits of trade, concentrate on fostering domestic policies that make it easier to do business in America, and develop better tools to help those adversely affected by trade.

Sure, international trade cheaters should be outed and sanctioned, but more importantly the U.S. government's default tool of retraining workers displaced by trade perhaps should be supplemented by wage subsidies for those who can find only lower-paying jobs and/or by relocation assistance that would help them go to where good jobs are being created in the U.S.

The globalism genie can't be stuffed back into the bottle. We have to find a better way to interact with the global economy, not run and hide from it.

Bob Foys

Inverness

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