Linfen, China

Middle Americans. The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I.

Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year.

Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit.

Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too.

The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade.

Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes.

If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy.

And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

Whatever happens from free trade is what should happen, free traders say. As Dr. Pangloss explained to Candide, whatever happens, happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Sure.