Cargo cults were religious movements arising periodically in New Guinea since before World War II. Charismatic cult leaders claimed that building harbors or landing strips would bring in ships or planes carrying goods like those the Westerners had but would not share.

The cargo, of course, never came.

Today's version is the "Cult of Free Trade." Cultists, while exporting jobs and investment capital under the rubric of "Free Trade," chant their mantra: "We'll all have better jobs and higher living standards, by and by."

The evidence, of course, is that we won't.

More and more jobs are being sent off-shore and are not being replaced, or are being replaced with lower-paying jobs. The jobs are gone and "innovation and creativity" aren't going to get them back, because even high-end jobs are leaving faster than ever.

And it's going to get worse - we are now in a global job market whose unemployment/under-employment rate is nearly incomprehensible - India creates 2.1 million college grads a year, and perhaps ten percent get work in their chosen fields (250,000 of those grads are engineers, China creates twice as many of those; for comparison, we graduate 60,000).

And when multinationals can send $1 in labor to India and get a net of $1.12 back, what incentive do they have to invest that return in the U. S.?

Clearly the mantra of the Free Trade Cultists is wrong - things aren't going to get better by and by - but that begs the question: why is it wrong?

International trade has provided a better quality of life for societies stretching back to the time of the Phoenicians and beyond. What's wrong with us in the here and now?

One major issue is that today's U. S. trade practices are not "Free Trade" by any stretch of the imagination

U. S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has been traveling the world recently, strong-arming nations into accepting "absolutely-positively-not-free-trade" bilateral trade agreements.

One recent headline reads: "NCGA and USGC Support U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement" [03/01/2004]. In spite of the headline, it is not free trade. The National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) and U.S. Grains Council (USGC) love it and they should - we have subsidized American corn growers to the tune of $35 billion from 1997-2002. It's the most heavily subsidized crop in the country.