> We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders
And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that!
Free trade results in more goods for everyone, by enabling different places to focus on what they do best.
> while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce.
I completely agree that some more attention needs to be paid to retraining. The answer to disappearing jobs is to prepare folks for new ones, not to artificially preserve the old ones. One has to be careful, though, not to distort the market for retraining itself.