The crumbling of so-called “free trade” has got to be near when you read The Wall Street Journal and learn that “Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain will
use his campaign’s first big economic speech today to talk about
downsides of free trade.” Apparently, McCain will “acknowledge that
open markets have resulted in pain for some individuals whose jobs are
being eliminated or sent overseas…” Of course, McCain’s response is classic: retraining.

Retraining has been a bi-partisan failure. The problem is that retraining has simply set people up for a failure because they can’t find jobs that pay anywhere near what they made before. The solution is not retraining–it’s a different conception of how to set up the rules of the global economy. But, it does say something that McCain feels compelled to even acknowledge that something is amiss.