Canada's relationship with Mexico

We know that a function of capitalism is to benefit the holders of wealth.

Yep! You might say that capitalism is the absolute worst economic system ever devised by mankind ... except for all the others.

By all measures, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, helped raise the standards of living in Canada, Mexico, and United States. The problem with agreements of this type is that the results are uneven and messy. There are winners and losers and unforeseen and unintended consequences. My apologies in advance for suggesting that my Fellow Zihua Lovers read reputable articles on such matters. However, one only has to enter a phrase such as "nafta benefits and harmful effects" into the Internet search engine of your choice (or -- Heaven forbid! -- visit the local library of your choice) and one will be inundated with information on the effects of this agreement and its Trump-induced successor, USMCA, the United States Mexico Canada Agreement.

It would be so nice if we could wave a magic wand and have everyone amply blessed with the basics of life: food, clothing, and shelter ... and high-speed Internet access. Sad to say, it jest ain't so. In the meantime, we have to do our best and use the economic tools at our disposal. And ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when Adam Smith recommended free trade as an important tool for increasing the standard of living of economies in his monumental work The Wealth of Nations, we have seen him proved correct over and over again.

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Warning! Discussion of one of the unfortunate but completely expected consequences of NAFTA follows:

When NAFTA was fleshed out in the early 1990's, one of the industries opened was agriculture. The negotiators knew that Mexico's agriculture sector was going to be hammered by the U.S. and Canada. They knew beforehand that farmers in Mexico were going to see prices of corn and sorghum and other food commodities being sold for less than it cost the Mexican farmers to grow them. In a perfect world, they would have included a provision for a guest worker program so that the Mexican workers could legally work in the U.S. and Canada since the farm jobs in Mexico would be reduced drastically. At the same time, farms in the U.S. and Canada were in dire need of workers. Of course, NAFTA was such a hard sell in the U.S. that any hint of a guest worker program would have scuttled it completely. The result? Before NAFTA, an estimated 2 million undocumented workers lived in the U.S. By 2007, an estimated 7 million undocumented workers were living in the U.S. (The latter number is sometimes reported as much higher.) Again, ain't nuthin' we humans have done is perfect!