I love you Brad I really do and I think you are genuinely well intentioned, but I also think you are significantly off target on a number of points here.



First, yes, you are correct that so-called “free trade” does, depending on its structuring, benefit our partners in a way that may have tangential benefits to us like security. However, that is not in the slightest how these deals were sold to the American people. These deals were supposed to be immediately mutually beneficial and they were not sold with the inference that we would see Detroit and the rest of its middle class jobs hollowed out and sent to places like China.



Are you saying that this was the design from the beginning – that industrial jobs, curiously mostly unionized, would find their way elsewhere? Are you saying our leadership knowingly passed a treaty that would destroy the middle class as it was known at the time? Are you saying the millions of Americans that lost jobs as a result, even if some have since found employment in the vaunted “technology drivers”, were willingly signing up for such a traumatic transition?



I am no millennial – I was well aware of what NAFTA was being sold as and no American, no matter how generous we were, was agreeing to give up their jobs to better less affluent nations. The notion itself is perverse – who with any sanity would buy that? Maybe more importantly, who with any sanity would sell that?



Secondly, yes, it has improved the living standard of say China, but Central America and South America are a mess. Mexico despite syphoning enormous numbers of auto jobs has not improved its standard of living to any significance. This is in part because while one industry has improved, its corn industry has been devastated by cheap subsidized American imports (subsidized of course hardly being in the spirit of “free” trade). Moreover Mexican workers, as with other partners, do not have the protections that American workers have, nor the same environmental protections. Many have limitations on collective bargaining as well as other workers’ rights (can you have “free trade” with countries that are not free?). This means we are effectively exporting poverty and pollution. That our workers cannot compete is no surprise given they do not play on the same playing field.



To that end, why did our progressive forerunners fight so hard for gains like worker protections and environmental protections when we are willing to trade them away so easily by migrating them somewhere else? Why did workers literally give their lives to fight for these protections for Americans only to say they don’t matter in another country? Do these rights only matter for privileged Americans? Sure, someday maybe they will come up to our standards, but until then (if ever), our workers suffer unfair competition.



Third, what is your definition of “industries that require[d] low wages”? Were auto workers such an industry? Steel workers? TV makers? Furniture makers? Clothes pin makers? All of these jobs once provided Americans steady jobs that on a single salary allowed people to not only have a roof over their head, but feed themselves, pay for medical care, have vacations, and even retire with guaranteed pensions. Were these “low wages”? Because if they were low wages, there are a tens of millions of millennials who would sign up for them in a heartbeat.

Fourth, who are you or anyone else to play god choose what industries require “low wages” (losers) and those that don’t (winners)? And make no doubt about it, winners and losers are being chosen – the outcomes are not inevitable. These trade deals are structured to favor some over others. What you call “low wage” face international competition, while other jobs as Dean Baker has noted, like say those of academics, doctors, and others in the “credentialed class”, see no such competition. Is this because they are, using your word, more “important”? This seems an extreme value judgement, at one time people thought making ball bearings or rolling steel was important. I don’t see why that isn’t true today.



When one profiles the classes that are most influential in governance, coincidentally those that make the most money, their jobs aren’t the kinds of jobs that are subject or open to free trade. Curious how that is. One has to wonder if such supportive articles would be written if the competition was in the professions of those writing in support of “free” trade.



Fifth, how is it that we know that “technology drivers” are (more) “important”? Because iPhones make people happier? Because cool tech makes the world better? Because Star Trek?



Sure, medical advances help the world, if you can afford them that is, but do you really feel that the “technology drivers” have made life for the average American better than it was in the 1950s? Yeah, technology may give a leg up on competition, but as I see it only so that you can spin the rat wheel of competition ever faster. We make better technology so we can outpace other countries so later they can try to outpace us, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Does it ever end? Is this a future to be encouraging?



More importantly, will technology get us what matters most, like comfort or more time with friends and family? I doubt it. Maybe I’ll check my iPhone on it.



Ok, I love my toys as much as the next one, but I’d give up every last one if it were to ensure living wages, health care, and a guarantee of a decent retirement for all Americans, not just the ones who are “technology drivers”. Sure, I can Google faster than ever what I need to redo the bathroom, but is that worth sacrificing millions of what were once great jobs for?



Finally, what is your plan here? We have traded some massive ratio of manufacturing for far fewer technology and professional jobs. You’re a smart guy, sincerely, how many people can be a professor at Berkley? What percentage of Americans are capable of creating a “startup” like Google? What percentage are even capable of working at a startup like Google?



Let’s not pretend – there are great masses of people who have no hope of entering the “creative” or “credentialed” class, of being entrepreneurial John Galts, and no amount of education is going to change that. That is not because they are stupid, worthless, or have less value – they just they aren’t wired for the same things. They were however wired for the jobs people like you decided had less value, jobs that you call “low wage”, but weren’t “low wage” ironically until you made them low wage by foisting unregulated international competition on them.



So now what are we going to do with these people? Are we to consign them to a lifetime of service jobs saying “Would you like fries with that?” Do we just give up on them because they aren’t meritorious enough to have what it takes to program, become lawyers, or found a startup?



In the words of Billy Bragg, “Just because you’re better than me, doesn’t mean I’m lazy.”



I sincerely don’t get it – if technology is the U.S.’s future, and the “low wage” manufacturing is somewhere else, how are we going to employee all of these people in jobs that even have some semblance of the future they once had?



Even if you are right in your position here, you say the problem is ultimately a failure of policy, but I say it’s a failure of vision on those who made these trade policies. They (you?) knew what was going to happen and they knew we needed policy to make up for the damage, but they put through these trade deals without ensuring the legislation was there to mitigate the damage.



So, what are you and the other supporters/architects of these deals going to do about it? I ask because it seems the milquetoast candidate you are endorsing with your dog whistle “peddling ideology over practicality” comments is only offering “incremental” care for the great hemorrhage that once was our working class.