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Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.
Sep 10, 2025
I support free trade. Donald Trump supports free trade.Trade means jobs. Jobs in the United States, jobs in my home state of Indiana are supported by international exports.
Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
We want free trade but we want free trade that is good. We want free trade that levels the playing field.
NAFTA and GATT have about as much to do with free trade as the Patriot Act has to do with liberty.
Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.
Free trade is very important if we respect equality among nations.
Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of world government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright, shining lie.
I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.
Sanctions are not diplomacy. They are a precursor to war and an embarrassment to a country that pays lip service to free trade.
It strikes me as very strange that whereas Tennyson could support most of Mr. Buckley's propositions about free trade, and the private sector, and private enterprise, Tennyson found no difficulty also in lending intellectual support to the idea of Women's Liberation.
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.
Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.
I do think creating an open free-trade economy but with strong social support is the way to go.
Incidentally, I don't think there is a non-adjectival 'globalisation'. What we have now is a particular form: dominated by finance and multinational corporations and by a rhetoric (though not a reality) of 'free trade' and market forces. So I'm not a localist. I'm an internationalist, but one who believes (a) that such a thing is really only possible through a prior grounding and (b) that the terms of our present globalisation have to be challenged politically.
They [the Kochs] want free trade and cheap labour. They own the second-largest private company in America, which is a huge multinational corporation. So they are on a different wavelength.
We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?
America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.
I do think, over the last years, a lot of Republicans have decided it's not working, what the party believed in, free trade, global capitalism, open borders.
I'm a free market person, a free trader. But if we had a market in California, there would be competition.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The advantage to Great Britain of a regular free trade in corn would, therefore, be more by raising the rest of the world to our standard and price, than by lowering the prices here to the standard of the Continent.
Why, when the economist gives advice to his society, is he so often cooly ignored? He never ceases to preach free trade, and protectionism is growing in the United States. He deplores the perverse effects of minimum wage laws, and the legal minimum is regularly raised each 3 or 5 years. He brands usury laws as a medieval superstition, but no state hurries to repeal its law.
Globalism began as a vision of a world with free trade, shared prosperity, and open borders. These are good, even noble things to aim for.
Donald Trump needs to stay focused and remember the promises to you, the American people. You know the promises, repeal and replace Obamacare, identify radical Islam, lower taxes, repatriate corporate profits, build the border wall, appoint originalists to the Supreme Court, fix inner cities, energy independence, drain the swamp, send education back to the states, you know, say radical Islam, vet refugees, all of these important issues, free trade.
The message from history is so blatantly obvious - that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty - that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.
I think bolstering free trade is a boon to the dollar.
OK, so here's the deal. First of all, "The Wall Street Journal" was bought for $5 billion. It's now worth $500 million, OK. They don't have to tell me what to do. "The Wall Street Journal" has been wrong so many different times about so many different things. I am all for free trade, but it's got to be fair. When Ford moves their massive plant to Mexico, we get nothing. We lose all of these jobs.
I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.
The free flow of people across borders is not to be confused with the free flow of goods across borders. Free trade is a positive-sum game. Contrary to illegal immigration, it is always invited, consensual and hence mutually beneficial to the parties involved.
The idea of explaining why free trade is good, why immigration is good, why the world is so connected, that we need to think in terms of humanity and being generous to each other, you know, that's proving to be a challenge.
I am for joining a free trade zone. The European Union is not such zone, but a zone of raging bureaucracy which stears every hectolitre of wine, and every tone of beef.
America is the primary engine of growth in the world and we are the only beacon of free trade left, and open markets.
Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or nations, you must realize that your standard of living is being lowered as a result.
In a regime of Free Trade and free economic intercourse it would be of little consequence that iron lay on one side of a political frontier, and labour, coal, and blast furnaces on the other. But as it is, men have devised ways to impoverish themselves and one another; and prefer collective animosities to individual happiness.
The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice.
If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?
I think Canadians, by and large, during the American election, every time Donald Trump talked about NAFTA, we felt that he was talking about Mexico. Now, if Donald Trump tears up NAFTA, there is still a Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. And we all assume that we will revert back to that agreement, which is essentially the same as NAFTA except Mexico is no longer at the table. I think, you know, that is what we are hoping for.
Now we are talking about concluding a free trade agreement between the Eurasian Economic Council, recently established in the post-Soviet space, and China. A similar agreement was concluded a short time ago with Vietnam. Then, we will coordinate, at least we are ready to do this, the Chinese concept of the Silk Road Economic Belt with our newly-created regional organisation. So, do you understand how diverse, multi-faceted and deep Russian-Chinese ties have become over the last couple of decades? And we resolved the border issue.
Negotiating sugar trade in bilateral free trade agreements is a recipe for disaster for the U.S. sugar industry, and it is unnecessary.
Because of the Korean free trade agreement, South Koreans who want Oregon blueberries are gonna see their prices go down because we will be getting rid of a 45 percent tariff on this Oregon product.
The message is NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) is there. NAFTA has helped both our countries enormously. We live up to the terms of NAFTA. We ask you, our best friend and most important trading partner to do the same thing.
The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist
It's very hard to find things that rhyme with North American Free Trade Agreement.
We are in the presence of a recruiting drive systematically and deliberately undertaken by American business, by American universities, and to a lesser extent, American government, often initiated by talent scouts specially sent over here to buy British brains and preempt them for service of the U.S.A. ... I look forward earnestly to the day when some reform of the American system of school education enables them to produce their own scientists so that, in an aimiable free trade of talent, there may be adequate interchange between our country and theirs, and not a one-way traffic.
Free trade has been proven, time and again, as a reliable path to economic development. It pushes the public and private sectors alike toward greater accountability and transparency. It lifts people out of poverty, and while it can force unsettling changes on a society, those changes prove to be worthwhile in a very short time.
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents.
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge.
The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.