We should be talking about fair trade and not free trade.Would you put a dolphin up against Ian Thorpe or give his opposition a two lap start in an Olympic race?

There should be a tarrif on cheap labour so multi-nationals don't drive people into abject poverty.Labor in Vietnam is now 30 cents per hour.For us to compete we will have to live like them.In addition, all the regulation ,red tape,OH&S in the West further makes competition impossible.Currently it is a race to the bottom.

Why are we spending $ trillions on moving goods all adound the planet.The shipping industry produces more toxic pollutants than all the cars/trucks on the planet.If we made more things at home,energy would be saved, pollution reduced and jobs increased.

Neatly put.

It will be interesting to see whether the protectionists find anything in this article that they are able to argue against, or whether they will try hard to ignore its simple truths.

I notice that Arjay has rushed in with the "we are exploiting the workers" routine, studiously avoiding the corollary that if we slap a "tarrif on cheap labour" (whatever that means), the result will be to price those workers out of their livelihood.

If such a tax had existed twenty years ago, tens - even hundreds - of millions of Chinese workers would still be languishing in abject poverty. Not only that, but our own cost of living would have been higher, without the benefit of the cheap goods that now form a significant portion of our household expense.

I suspect that our anti-free-traders are motivated more by fear, than by logic, and would prefer to see our society back in the little-Australia 1950s. Fact is, that might still happen, as the economic balance in the world inexorably shifts. But protectionism can only hasten that process, not delay or prevent it.

Pericles,

Here's a go...India has just redrawn (manipulated) its "poverty line".....so now unless you're existing on less than the equivalent of 64 cents a day, you're not under the "poverty line".
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/27/business/india-poverty-line/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Nice to see it's so easy to lift people out of abject poverty in developing countries simply by lowering the bar.

Let's keep a realistic viewpoint on the exploitation and sheer waste of resources involved in globalisation - not to mention the loss of traditional knowledge and social cohesion in developing countries. all these things accompany a "modest" rise in affluence.

"Not living in poverty" is an easily manipulated term, it seems.

“The irony of any Australian arguing for protectionism is that Australia as we now know it – a free trade zone between its several states and territories - would not exist were it not for the efforts of earlier advocates of free trade who exploded the economic fallacies on which the case for protectionism rests.”

This is a whopping great red herring.
There were no huge multinational corporations waiting to explore every loophole, in the search to cut costs and increase profits at that time.

Free trade as it is now, is flawed because it does not take into account the level of pay and conditions that apply in each country.
To be a real level playing field tariffs should be applied to imports to bring them up to the cost levels of the receiving country by including the difference between wages and environmental costs.
It would not then be a reason to close down a perfectly good manufacturing system to move it offshore and increase the profits from the sweated labor.

*Labor in Vietnam is now 30 cents per hour.For us to compete we will have to live like them*

Clearly not, Arjay. Now lets take one of our largest imports as
an example, motor vehicles. How many cars on our roads were made
in Vietnam or even China?

There is alot more to trade then just labor, or Germany would not
be one of the world's largest exporters and my lambs would not
be exported all cut up, to 50 countries. So your argument is a bit
simplistic.

Karl Marx saw free trade as 'revolutionary'. Today it is bizarre that people could oppose it: the reality of global economic intergration has advanced so far and is irreversible. From Marx's speech to the Democratic Association in Brussels in 1848:

"...the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

"But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade"