One must realize that free trade itself was started by liberals to promote the self-interest of the individual over the good of the nation. Free trade was created by liberals to satisfy their own atheist and anti-nationalist goals of creating a utopia on earth of open borders and unlimited economic growth. That being said, while the doctrine itself is appealing to that class of people which benefits from that economic model (i.e. the think tank scribblers, the college professors, economists, Wall Street, the corporate class, etc.) it is disasterous for everyone else (i.e. the working class and middle class).

The working class is forced to see their livelihood be destroyed, their wages lowered, to see once-booming manufactoring cities turned into ghost towns, see their jobs sent overseas, see the value of the money supply dwindle, see their jobs taken by immigrants, see their benefits gone, etc. while the middle class (small-business owners) is forced to see farms being taken over by mega-farm corporations along with the dominance of corporations in business life, which can easily choke out small businesses by their cheap overseas goods. That is the consequences of the liberal economic model.

To the consumer in this market economy (since American values pretty much boil down to consumerism and hedonism), all of these cheap good are great since they can now buy things at a real low price HOWEVER, the consumer fails to realize why the foreign product is cheap (i.e. foreign nations have lower labor, environmental and health laws, and foreign nations don't have to pay a tax to enter our market since they come in duty-free, thus making it cheap) and so they fail to realize they are actually helping out nations like China and they are promoting national companies to move overseas and destroy domestic jobs, and they are promoting the destruction of the value of the money supply.

Eventually the liberal doctrine of free trade is very harmful for the nation and leads to its destruction, which was the hope and dream for liberals like Cobden and Bastiat all along.

I think you might like this article TradGuy20...

Volcker on the restoration of Bretton Woods and our present financial problems

Background to 1971 – At the time, the U.S. had unemployment and inflation rates of 6.1% (Aug 1971) and 5.84% (1971), respectively. To combat these issues, President Nixon consulted the advice of Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, incoming Treasury Secretary John Connally, and then undersecretary for international monetary affairs and future Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

The Nixon Shock
By Roger Lowenstein (BloombergBusinessweek Magazine)
August 04, 2011

Volcker envisioned that once exchange rates were modified, Bretton Woods would be restored, perhaps with a more flexible mechanism for adjusting rates. He tirelessly negotiated with Europe and Japan, but Bretton Woods could not be put back together. The gold window stayed shut. More devaluations followed, and by 1973, currencies were freely floating.

Friedman’s prediction that, left to the market, currencies would regulate themselves with only gradual adjustments proved wildly incorrect. The dollar plunged by a third during the ’70s, and currency volatility has threatened several national economies since; in 1997, Asian and Latin American countries were wrecked by currency runs. To this day, Volcker regrets that Bretton Woods was abandoned. “Nobody’s in charge,” he says. “The Europeans couldn’t live with the uncertainty and made their own currency and now that’s in trouble.” The effect on America’s domestic economy was even worse. As Shultz says, “Price controls gave the illusion of doing something about inflation.” They further liberated Nixon from concern for the normal rules. Late in 1971, he wrote to the Fed chief, “You have given me absolute assurance that money supply growth will be adequate to maintain growth.” Burns scrawled in the margin, “Never gave him absolute assurance. What nonsense!” But Burns, intentionally or not, delivered on Nixon’s demand for an expansionary monetary policy.

Controls had the desired short-term effect; inflation was quiescent through the end of 1972, when Nixon easily won reelection. The controls, however, proved difficult to end. The 90-day freeze begat a more complicated wage and price regime, a Phase II, followed by a Phase III, lasting into ’74. And Burns’s easy money fostered a monetary steam cooker that controls could not suppress. By August ’74, when Nixon resigned, inflation had topped 11 percent. Soon it would go even higher. Expectations of rising prices became embedded in the system.

The Nixon Shock was a central cause of the Great Inflation. It also spelled the end of the fixed relationships that had governed the financial universe. Previously, people took out mortgages for set periods and at fixed rates. They had virtually no options for saving money other than in banks, and the interest rates that banks could pay were capped. Floating currencies unleashed a new world of risk and instability. For the first time, investors could bet on the direction of interest rates or the Swiss franc. New financial instruments, new speculative tools, proliferated. The world gravitated from the certainties of Bretton Woods to the dizzying market cycles we’ve lived with since. Donald Kohn, who joined the Fed in 1970 and retired last year as vice-chairman, thinks Bretton Woods was doomed. But bankers have yet to find as rigorous a standard as gold. And they have become ever more apt to please politicians, deferring recessions at the risk of inflating asset bubbles.

Burns was replaced by Jimmy Carter in 1978. The following year, with inflation rocketing toward 15 percent, Burns delivered a keynote speech, “The Anguish of Central Banking,” in which he argued that central bankers around the world were failing because elected leaders were unwilling to risk displeasing constituents. The new Fed chief, Volcker, did tame inflation; unlike Burns, he had the fortitude to subject the country to a brutal recession. But the dilemma faced by Burns—how to withstand the demands of the public for limitless monetary expansion—did not go away. We see it now in the troubles of nations from Greece to Ireland to the U.S. And the anguish that Burns felt is Ben Bernanke’s unfortunate inheritance.

“Paper money is a token representing gold or money.”
(Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Capital, I, Chap III, section 2, part c.)

“From A.D. 757 to his death in 791, the great King Offa ruled the kingdom of Mercia, 1 one of the seven autonomous kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Offa was a wise and able administrator and a kindhearted leader, though he could be hard on his enemies. He established the first monetary system in England (as distinguished fromRomano-Keltic Britain). On account of the scarcity of gold, he used silver for coinage and as a store of wealth. The standard unit of exchange was a pound of silver, divided into 240 pennies. The pennies were stamped with a star (Old English stearra), from which the word “sterling” is derived. In 787 Offa introduced a statute prohibiting usury: charging of interest on money lent. The laws against usury were further entrenched by King Alfred (r. 865-99), who directed that the property
of usurers be forfeited, while in 1050 Edward the Confessor (1042-66) decreed not only forfeiture, but that a usurer be declared an outlaw and be banished for life.”
(The hidden origins of the Bank of England – BY STEPHEN GOODSON)

Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace:
TOWARDS REFORMING THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL AND MONETARY SYSTEMS IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL PUBLIC AUTHORITY.

“In recent decades, it was the banks that extended credit, which generated money, which in turn sought a further expansion of credit. In this way, the economic system was driven towards an inflationary spiral that inevitably encountered a limit in the risk that credit institutions could accept. They faced the ultimate danger of bankruptcy, with negative consequences for the entire economic and financial system…
The speculative bubble in real estate and the recent financial crisis have the very same origin in the excessive amount of money and the plethora of financial instruments globally.”