Corporate economists and media shills still think economic "efficiency" is solely a corporate prerogative whose only meaning is to reward the greater slave and punish the higher wage and standard. They do not recognize any input from the vast majority in either defining or determining their level and practice of efficiency. In their eyes "comparative advantage" has no morals or scruples, so slavery wins.
For the First World economies, free trade has been an unmitigated disaster serving to create abject dependency on, of all people and regimes, communist capitalists! We now see our politicians pleading with China to get off their currency peg, all so we can make their goods more expensive here now that we decimated our domestic production capabilities. In any case, budget deficits and stimulus spending have been created, and necessitated, by bad trade policy.
Do you begin to see the utter idiocy of forced free trades here, particularly those who put up with an undemocratic World Trade Organization in which the vast majority of wage-earner have no say as to what happens with their economy and country?
In any event, the way out of this mess is to get together with the remaining democratic (I use the word loosely) countries and either withdraw from these fascist trade schemes, and/or rework the system so people elect their trade representatives, and retain the freedom to use tariff adjustments to manage their domestic economies, and thus enjoy real economic and cultural freedom.
Attempting to re-balance by currency wars is counterproductive and like killing a flea with a sledgehammer. Did I mention that Goldman Sachs and the big bank owners of the Fed are the ones who profit by currency-driven trade and the lack of any Bretton-Woods fixed exchange rates scheme?
Clearly, the fascist top-down scheme was unnecessary (not to mention vile) as companies can always get their global markets by producing and selling within countries around the world and without having tariff-free re-entry of greater-slave goods serving to extinguish the better world that gave them birth, screwing the higher standard, erasing the middle class, and decimating tax revenues, etc.
To arbitrage your own nation's labor and vast majority of wage-earners is to screw your own children and grandchildren under a scheme that is simply reprehensible.
Further, the idea that Smoot-Hawley had something to do with the Depression is also bogus in that the Federal Reserve began contracting the money supply in March of 1929 in a well-documented insider Wall Street scheme to fleece the people.
Adding to the problem, Herbert Hoover was cutting investment and budgets when Congress tried, with Smoot-Hawley in 1931, to do something to save the nation from a bankster-driven depression following a bankster-driven boom.
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