Here again we need to look at a real example, of real buyers and sellers, workers and employers, showing what is the difference between "free" and "fair" trade, and which kind is better. Or, which produces better results.
And it's also necessary to define "free" vs. "fair" trade. If you don't like my definition, then give your own. There's not necessarily one only precise definition. But your point is lost unless you tell us what "fair trade" means, which no one here is doing yet.
"Free trade" = the market price is best. / "Fair trade" = the market price is too low.
This says mostly what the difference is. In virtually all examples we run into, "fair" means that a buyer is getting off too easy, especially employers, because the price (wage) they pay is too low. It's usually about demanding that workers be paid higher wages. Which means higher than the minimum employers have to pay in order to get someone to do the work. Whereas "free trade" is just letting all the transactions, including employment, happen at the market price, or the cheapest price buyers can find in order to get what product/service they want (including quality). I.e., the lowest price for the same production.
So "free trade" permits cheap labor, or lowest wage that employers must pay in order to find workers to take the job, while "fair trade" insists on a higher wage than the cheapest the employer can find.
Don't pretend to be addressing this topic, unless you either take this definition, or give your own alternative definition. Don't just keep throwing around the words "free" and "fair" without ever saying what the difference is.
And also, at some point you must offer a
real example, from the real world, of real buyers and sellers, or real employers and wage-earners, and show why in that example "fair" trade is better, or why "free" is not better. You can't just keep repeating these terms without saying what they mean and without giving a real example of "free" or "fair" trade showing the difference.
Fair trade is free trade. Nothing in your bombastic walls of pathetic whinging recognizes nor changes the reality that you are against free trade.
What they don't realize is that leaving a trade partner with a FAIR deal means a trade partner that wants to trade more, and is left with more resources with which to grow their supply and business.
How can we convert this abstraction into something concrete? What's a real-world example we can apply it to? How about the sweatshop example, which no one yet is responding to. A company (in Bangladesh) hires workers at very low wages and poor labor conditions, and with this cost saving is able to sell shirts to American consumers at half the price of other producers.
The workers here are the "trade partner" who might not be getting a "fair deal" and so won't want "to trade more" in the future. The sweatshop owner takes this into consideration, and gets the wage level down as low as possible, to attract just enough labor to maximize the production. If that wage level is too low, the employer risks losing the desperate worker, who might find some other employment more attractive. But in many cases the likelihood of that is low, because there aren't many other employment opportunities for the desperate job-seekers.
So is there really any reason to worry that the sweatshop workers ("trading partner") won't want "to trade more" in the future? that the employer is ignoring the need to satisfy his "supplier" (worker) with a "fair deal"? leaving that worker without the "resources with which to grow their supply and business"? It's silly to second-guess the employer's judgment on this. He's not stupid. He knows that his price (wage) offer has to be just high enough to attract the workers in the future, perhaps just enough to get them to stay and not go elsewhere. And any individual worker might be expendable, or replaceable, so that the sweatshop owner needn't fear the risk of losing a small number of them if there are other job-seekers waiting to take their place.
Realistically, in the actual examples, the sweatshop selling the cheap shirts seems to be a good business model, to serve the consumers and make everyone better off than they would be otherwise. Where is the flaw in this model, as long as the workers are making a free choice, and are free to seek something better. And how are the consumers not all better off as a result?
Over-leveraging suppliers means less economic energy by which they may produce supply.
The workers are being over-leveraged, so this results in "less economic energy" to produce more supply? Maybe the workers drop dead, or get exhausted and faint? Is there any reason to believe the sweatshop workers and owner are not already taking this into consideration? You can't just whine that things are tough. You have to show what the alternative is. If you prohibit this production from happening altogether, eliminating the sweatshop and the jobs, how have you made those workers any better off? When they were working and getting exhausted, they were producing some benefit for someone, and also making themselves better off than they would be if they did not work. But with the sweatshop eliminated, now the workers are left worse off -- i.e. the same as not working, which they rejected earlier in favor of the unpleasant job which gave them something.
So eliminating the sweatshop leaves them worse off, not better. With the sweatshop there for them, the workers ended up with "less economic energy" than if they did not work, but that spent energy got them some result they preferred to the alternative of not working. The workers make that judgment, preferring even to lose some "economic energy" over not working at all, but they make the choice to spend that "economic energy" in return for the benefit to gain. They aren't competent to make that choice?
At some point you have to explain how those workers are not capable of making that choice, and that the best condition for them has to be dictated to them, rather than letting them make the choice. Until you explain this, you haven't shown how the "fair trade" situation is better for them.
If you bleed your suppliers, yes you end up paying less... Right until the supplier collapses for lack of profit . . .
The sweatshop worker "collapses"? Obviously "supplier" here means another business, but the worker also is a "business" in the proper sense, supplying labor, or a resource to the buyer/employer. Even a penniless worker might "collapse" financially in some sense. It's possible the worker is unable to make responsible decisions, going into debt irresponsibly, or otherwise making a foolish decision, including wasteful spending decisions.
No matter how you try to solve this, offering some kind of alternative to desperate job-seekers, the strategy of eliminating sweatshops doesn't solve anything. If you have a real alternative to offer the desperate job-seeker, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's the alternative which is the solution, not just condemning the sweatshop choice. Eliminating the sweatshop per se can only make it all worse, not better. If there really is an alternative, then the worker would have chosen it. You can't pretend there is an alternative if the worker chooses the sweatshop as the best choice.
You can emote phrases like "bleeding" them until they "collapse" etc., and even depict them as being tortured and in agony, but no matter how many inflammatory words you use to describe it, you're still not showing how the non-sweatshop alternative isn't even worse. Why did the workers choose this torture and "bleeding" and agony and "collapsing" etc. unless the alternative they faced was even worse? Just taking away the sweatshop choice from them does not fix whatever that even-worse alternative was that they avoided by making this choice.
So you have to get beyond the "bleeding" and "collapsing" linguistics to fall back on. If that's all you have to offer, you're refuted by the simple "it's a tough world out there" linguistics which puts an end to your "fair trade" whining linguistics. The fact is that the sweatshop is the best alternative in those cases, as long as you don't have a job to offer those workers. You can't just pretend that someone out there wants them enough to pay them a higher wage, and yet all you're doing is pretending when you can only keep complaining how bad their sweatshop alternative is. This complaining per se does not solve anything, such as producing new opportunities and new business prospects and new wealth-creation.
. . . until the supplier collapses for lack of profit same as when workers are overworked and underpaid and you end up churning though workers who slide into poverty, obscurity, and eventually into ruin.
Which was already the case
before the sweatshop ever existed. The sweatshop didn't cause any of that and does not cause it. What the sweatshop does is reduce that poverty and obscurity and ruin at least partly, for those workers. Your "fair trade" alternative takes away that alternative choice from them and forces them into greater poverty and obscurity and ruin than was already the case.
So the "fair trade" model makes everyone WORSE OFF, not better, when we try to apply it to any
real-world example. The "fair trade" crusaders cannot make a case based on any real-world concrete case, of real people, real buyers and sellers, making real decisions in the actual world where real good and evil is happening. When you apply it to real examples, it's free trade which makes people better off, while "fair" trade tries to impose abstractions onto the players, pretending there are alternatives which don't really exist.
So, give your definition of "fair" and "free" trade and apply it to real examples in the real world, showing how "fair" trade produces better results. If you don't like the sweatshop example, then give a different one, but quit running away from the topic by just preaching abstract dogmas.
Abstract jargon is not sufficient, no matter how much "collapsing" and "bleeding" or "exploiting" and "deplorable" and other sensationalist jargon you come up with. You still have to show that the "fair trade" alternative doesn't leave the victims even worse off.
So far all the facts show that "free trade" offers people a chance to make life better, at least gradually, in small steps, through competition which motivates the producers to improve their performance; whereas "fair trade" ideology only complains that the trade, or the free market left to itself, does not produce the perfect utopian workers paradise romanticized by wishful thinkers.
