Free Trade Foes Missing Big Picture

* Readers concerned about corporate greed and a purported desire to pay slave wages as driving the WTO’s free trade agenda don’t give these conspirators credit for minimal intelligence [“Plight of U.S. Workers Should Come First,” Letters, Dec. 12].

Marxist theory had it right in seeing the need for capitalism to continually expand markets, but Marx didn’t foresee economies of scale would result in more people having more goods at ever-lower prices.

Today money is made by selling a lot at low margins, rather than a little at a high mark-up.

Your readers don’t have the insight demonstrated by that quintessential capitalist Henry Ford when he paid his workers $5 per day, a multiple of then-existing wage rates. An example of enlightened self-interest, Ford knew that he wouldn’t expand his market if workers couldn’t afford his product.

ROBERT L. SHARP

South Pasadena