>>1083711>Finally, you might think that sugar is a lot less valuable than the stuff the United States produces. This is called a "negative trade balance," meaning that the United States has a lot more WSR-bux than things they want to buy from WSR-topia.Except it's the other way around. The US has had a deeply negative trade balance for well over a generation now (picture related). Free trade allows the US to consume a shitton of goods for dirt cheap, and boy does the US ever consume! I wouldn't bother normally (because the rest of what you say makes enough sense), but this issue has bubbled to the forefront of politics when Trump got elected and started his trade war with China and almost one with Europe. He though the negative trade balance was exclusively a bad thing when it actually propped up US consumerism and allowed the poor masses access to a lot of goods. A negative trade balance doesn't mean the people of the US get poorer, they just swap their money for goods they value more than money (they look to maximize their purchasing power).
Like you say, there is a flipside to everything and here that is cheap overseas production with dirt cheap shipping sure makes the pricetags in the stores go down, but it also kills domestic producing industries. Now the US is dependent on imports and loses jobs. But if it would try to go full autarky, prices would fucking soar on stuff like appliances and consumer electronics, because it would have to be manufactured in the US at multiple times the labor cost of what you have in East and South-east Asia (if there is even enough know-how and factory infrastructure left to make it in the first place).
