This is an excellent column by William K. Black, found here: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/05/stop-calling-deals-help-ceos-.... It's the second in his response to N. Gregory Mankiw's column in the New York Times, “The Economy Is Rigged, and Other Presidential Campaign Myths.”

Some highlights and hopefully, I'm not violating fair use rules here:

The “free trade deals” are pretexts for emasculating regulation and prosecution of corporate elites. They have virtually nothing to do with “trade” much less the oxymoronic abuse of the term “free trade.” Consider first why the deals are always crafted in an indefensible manner. The CEOs get to participate in making the deals. Consumers, workers, and investors are excluded under official secret laws.

The conventional economic claim for the (purported) paradox of greed is that it leads merchants to act as if they cared about the customer. If the customer can observe that the system is rigged against him – because he gets sick promptly after eating meat from the Butcher A – and if Butcher A has a competitor then Butcher A cannot sell customers bad meat and stay in business. None of these self-protective mechanisms work reliably in vast swaths of business. We cannot know whether a financial firm’s assets are massively overvalued. We know from UK experience with payment protection insurance (PPI) and U.S. experience with the yield spread premium (YSP) that “consumer choice” is a cynical cover for massive rip-offs of customers. None of us can know whether our airbags, pollution control systems, and ignition systems were manufactured by companies that have engaged in knowingly defective designs – and covered up the defects through fraud for over a decade.

In Mankiw’s unprincipled “ten principles” of economics (which consists of ten myths) he preaches that trade is wonderful because it allows “each person to specialize in the activities he or she does best.” The CEOs that led the three epidemics of accounting control fraud that caused the crisis did what they do best – they rigged the system to make themselves even wealthier by causing catastrophic harm to their fellow citizens and their nations. When frauds and cheat are able to specialize in what they do best with impunity the result is disastrous, not desirable. The international deals are designed to rig the system to allow the elite fraudsters to specialize in what they do best – acting as parasites and predators against the public.

The Michigan auto worker who is at her best in producing automobiles does not get to specialize in those activities. She is told to give up doing what she does best – or move to a state or Nation that pays its auto workers considerably less.

International wage differences mean that the international deals will tend to (net) reduce U.S. employment. But wage differences tend to be visible and often disguise the paramount reason that production costs are lower in foreign firms than U.S. firms. The larger cause of international production cost differentials in nations such as China, India, and Bangladesh is that enormous societal costs of production are not borne by the firm due to the failure to enforce effective safety and health regulations essential to protect workers, consumers, and the general public. When a Bangladeshi garment factory “saves money” by building a shoddy building illegally on marshy land it transfers the true costs of production to the workers – who were killed by the hundreds when the building collapsed. When an Indian or Chinese chemical firm “saves money” by dumping toxic waste illegally and that renders the rivers and lakes toxic it transfers the true costs of production to the general public. When a UK company sells disinfectants in Korea that kill and sicken hundreds of consumers it transfers the true costs of production to its customers. When Chinese and Indian firms “save money” by burning coal they transfer the true costs of production to the public – globally.