So, stuff happens, right? The Tsarevitch has hemophilia and we end up with the USSR for 70 years. This week, Hope Hicks quits and Jared Kushner loses his security clearance and we end up in a trade war with half the world. From tiny acorns do giant fck-ups grow. Myself? I always wanted to relive the hot-button political debates of the 19th and 20th centuries.

On Chris Hayes’ show last night there was a spirited hooley on the subject. On Friday, the administration trotted out its Secretary of Commerce, Sleepy Wilbur Ross, to dismiss the argument that the proposed tariffs will jack up the cost of anything made of steel or aluminum, which Ross attempted to do by holding up a can of soup. (Of course, when you’re rich enough to lie about exactly how rich you are, you don’t much care about what a can of Cream of Mushroom costs.) Jesus, these people…

I’ve gone back and forth on “free trade” ever since the phrase entered the political lexicon. It is such received wisdom among the Very Serious People that I’ve never quite trusted it. At the same time, it’s got so much power behind it that I’m afraid that any attempt to wrench it back is going to hurt as many people as it helps. I do know three things, however.

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1) I don’t trust the current presiding incompetent to screw around with it, without making the problems vastly worse. See also: two-car funeral.

2) “Free trade” means radically different things to radically different people up and down the social and economic spectrum. Nobody can agree on a definition for it beyond, “Good stuff cheap” and “retraining,” neither of which is compatible with the other.

3) Whatever it means, somewhere along the line, the whole system depends on poverty, authoritarianism, and human misery, most of which occurs far out of earshot of the media on which the free trade debate is generally conducted.

Take, for example, the country of Vietnam, where they make a lot of the steel that is currently in the news. In Ha Tinh province, a Taiwanese corporation built a massive steel manufacturing complex costing over $10 billion. The complex includes a power plant and a deep-sea port. During a test run for the plant two years ago this April, the company dumped a horrible mix of toxins, including cyanide, into the sea. This resulted in a massive fish kill, wiping out the livelihood of Vietnamese fishermen along a 125-mile stretch of the country’s coastline.

The company paid $500 million in compensation, but that wasn’t enough for the fishermen whose lives were ruined. They actually protested, in public, which is a dangerous business in Vietnam. Many of them have been arrested and jailed. An activist was convicted and sentenced recently simply for livestreaming one of the protests. That’s Free Trade as much as are the cheap TVs at Walmart.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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