Adjust Free Trade--Don't Destroy It

I'm still basically a free trade advocate. But I do recognize it has had bad effects at home despite the general pattern of good effects here.

I would like to see reliance on China for the production of key products dispersed to other more friendly countries even if it is impossible (because we simply can't do them cheaply enough to make sense) to bring those factories home.

It will be difficult to decouple given the weight of what was shifted there over decades. So we'd best start now. Perhaps we can help shift that production to allies who could use the work.

Shifting terms of trade toward America after the post-World War II policy of tilting them to allies and friends for strategic reasons when our economy was dominant in a war-ravaged world is not inappropriate. So I'm against a policy of autarky but for a policy of revised free trade terms.

And good grief, I certainly don't blame "globalism" for the Xi Jinping Flu pandemic. That's silly. That blame falls on the Chinese Communist Party.