If you want to dig still further down, into the basics of economics, consider: relatively free markets can only function within a context where the playing field is level for competitors -- the costs of manufacturing, marketing, and selling products are the same for everyone. Once you permit the massive import of goods from places where those costs are radically lower, you are rigging the game. The home country suffers. Companies shut down. Workers have no jobs. The general level of prosperity, whatever it was, keeps decaying. No matter how you slant and massage the numbers, no matter how many cockeyed theories you spawn, the outcome is unavoidable.
Compound this engineered tragedy by permitting those massive imports to come from a country where the citizens are rigidly controlled by a criminal regime; enter into a huge number of economic agreements with that regime; turn a blind eye to what that regime has been doing to its people; and you have a sacrifice of freedom on all fronts.
Then there is a chokehold. And then, on any occasion, for any reason, the brutal regime will issue a command:
Don't dare criticize us;
We're in this together;
We have no principles and neither do you.
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