About those trade treaties

Bernie and Donald are taking the Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot line on trade, and they have dragged Hillary reluctantly to their side.

Are they right?

Some people insist they are wrong.

Bernie Sanders' Free Trade Mythology

Trade isn't the bad guy

This in the WSJ about a Trump presidency says they are right.

Most economists now agree that wage stagnation in the U.S. and other advanced countries is caused by imports from China and other newly industrialized countries. 

Tariffs are unlikely, but one should expect vigorous antidumping measures, instead of allowing entire industries to be submerged.

But not all wages have even been affected, and it is at least possible that low prices have more than made up for such adverse impact as we have seen.

The CW now seems to be agreed that the dramatic rise in inequality in the US has been caused not only by the changes in the tax code Bernie cites but also by a loss of high paying manufacturing jobs due partly to union busting and the flight of factories from the pro-union North to the anti-union South but also in large part to free trade allowing the country to be flooded with products made abroad and sold cheaply here only because the foreign workers are markedly less well paid.

Again, to the extent that this is true at all, is the entire working class of America, or the entire white working class, actually losing by this?

Or are most workers actually gaining, despite the obvious advantages enjoyed by the most wealthy, with only those denied tariff or quota protection by all these treaties losing?

Protectionist measures, after all, only protect those in specified industries while inflating demand in their supply chains to the cost of everybody forced to pay higher prices or even priced out of the market and forced to go without.

Do the rest of us love the unionized heavy industry workers of the Rust Belt that much?

Do we really think we can make the UAW, the UMW, and the USW the royalty of the American working class, again?

Do we want to even try?

Do we want to dramatically force up the price of consumer electronics (Pat Buchanan often writes about cheap consumer electronics as though the very expression was a profanity) with tariffs in order to force the factories in China, Indonesia, Japan, and Korea to pack up and move to the USA?

We could probably do that.

Do we want to?

Should we do the same with textiles and shoes?

Would working class wages as a whole rise enough as a result to cover the huge increase in costs to millions upon millions of working class, poor, and other consumers?