but what free-traders fail to talk about, and their silence is deafening, is that free trade in the United States is a good idea. Proponents of free trade have remained silent in the face of anti-trade claims about job losses and a "race to the bottom." They have allowed misplaced fears about globalization to spread by default. Trumpeting the prospect of increased exports by U.S. multinationals simply isn't responsive to those fears; indeed, it plays to suspicions that the WTO is a front for big corporations that seek to profit at the expense of ordinary Americans. Many people favor freer trade, freer markets in general - not only in international trade but in all kinds of areas - because individuals are considered to be better in making decisions about what they want, how much they're prepared to pay for it, how they're going to use their resources. Individuals are considered to be better at making this kind of decisions than governments, unions, health services or any of the other institutions we have which set prices and distribute resources.
             Prices are supposedly the best indicator of the supply of any particular good relative to how much people want of it. If you have a surplus of a good and not many people want it, the price is going to be quite low. If a particular good is in demand, the prices are going to go up. This is a key idea, which lies behind not only trade policy, but also liberalization policies that we've seen in most countries around the world over the last 20 years. There are two key conditions for this whole concept to work. The first one is that there have to be a lot of buyers and sellers, so that no one individual or company can monopolize the market and influence what is produced and consumed, simply on the basis of their own decisions. The second condition is that everybody has to have information - peopl
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