Free trade is an academic luxury of ivory tower elites that average Americans can ill-afford, according to Stan Sorscher, a labor representative for the Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace.

The entire theory of free trade is built on the idea of comparative advantage – the ability of a party to produce a good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party.

While comparative advantage may have worked well in Centuries past, not so much in the globalized 21st Century international economy.

“Comparative Advantage is discredited in terms of logic, experience, policy, and common sense,” Sorscher writes in The Huffington Post. “It survives in the land of punditry.”

For one, the theory of comparative advantage assumes that each party involved in trade has full employment. That is obviously not the case. With a 9.5 percent national unemployment rate, millions of Americans are unemployed. Not to mention the countless unemployed citizens in Third World countries around the world, including American trading partners China, India and Brazil.

Comparative advantage theory also assumes that investment is not globalized, but rather localized. In reality, multinational corporations shop around for the cheapest workforce, the lowest labor and environmental standards and the most advantageous tax policies.

Another fallacy of free trade and comparative advantage is that workers can change jobs without the loss of earning power. This has proven to be demonstrably false. Over the years, as America entered into more and more trade agreements, the manufacturing jobs dried up only to be replaced by low-paying service sector jobs. The guy putting the onions on your burger at McDonalds is not paid nearly as well as the girl dropping the engine in your Chevy Cavalier on an assembly line.

The theory also assumes that all parties play by the rules. China is once again a shining example of this fallacy. With a currency undervalued by as much as 40 percent, Beijing officials are gaming the system in their favor.

In the end, free trade is a theory to be studied in an economics classroom, like the Laffer Curve or Supply and Demand, not an outdated idea to be applied in real life.

In all reality, free trade is beneficial for very few and detrimental to the masses.

“Free trade works very well for investors, financial institutions, and large multinational companies,” Sorscher writes. “At the same time, our free trade agreements push aside interests of workers, communities and the environment.”

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