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Comment by piokoch

7 days ago

Nope. It's true that free trade WAS hugely beneficial to the US economy as a whole. Now free trade is hurting USA economy and that's why USA play against the rules they were promoting for so long.

> Now free trade is hurting USA economy

Then why is the economy crashing under these new tariffs when it was recovering nicely just a few months ago?

Free trade is not hurting the economy. American domestic policy impacting the distribution of the produce of the economy is, even in times of strong aggregate economic performance, hurting the felt effects of the economy on large swathes of the population, but throwing up protectionist policies that collapse both the global and local production possibilities curves doesn't help that; it just shrinks the pie without doing anything to deal with the bad distribution which makes people feel like the pie is shrinking even when it is growing. The results you can expect from that should be obvious without experiencing them, but it looks like we are all going to learn about them through painful experience real soon now.

> Now free trade is hurting USA economy and that's why USA play against the rules they were promoting for so long.

Explain how is it hurting US economy?