I’m no math major but it seems like any price you charge for a product is a pretty good mark-up when you have zero labor costs.

The topic of slave labor is one that our global masters would try and sweep under the rug. Expose the fact that they employ dissidents and prostitutes in a Chinese prison factory, manufacturing two-bit office products and they run for cover faster than cockroaches in my mother-in-law’s kitchen.

Everyone from Wall Street to Capitol Hill was extolling the virtues of free-trade, a few years back. The North American Free Trade Agreement, Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and other such steps to a one-world economy were hailed as the best thing since imported French bread.

Even then, a few voices were heard crying in the wilderness about the danger such trade pacts posed to our standard of living. An unusual coalition of big labor, populists and social conservatives developed, concerned about human rights issues, the loss of U.S. jobs and the destruction of American sovereignty.

We were assured by "the powers that be" that the foxes guarding the hen house would protect our interests, heed our concerns and allow us the unbridled luxury of cheap imports with little or no domestic fall-out.

During the ensuing years, we watched textile mills close across the south, electronics factories jump the Rio Grande and shipments of illegal aliens and illicit drugs flooding north to fill the vacuum. We lowered our standards on imported vegetables. Our environmental protection laws got caught in NAFTA’s net, forcing us to accept tuna trapped by dolphin killers.

America went from being the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in the world. Our trade deficits skyrocketed. But the privileged few profited. They paid off the right people. And the sell-out of America continued.

One of the arguments used to support a level international playing field was that renegade nations like Red China could be convinced to abandon their reign of terror and treat their citizens in a more kindly fashion. Perhaps their tanks would stop rolling over protestors in Tienanmen Square. Maybe the policy of forced abortions could be rethought. And there was an outside chance the Beijing regime might allow moves toward freedom of religion, as well.

We shipped our technology, our advisors, our financial gurus to China in droves. Factories bloomed faster than poppy fields in a quaint neo-fascist economy that would have done Adolph Hitler right proud. New, state-run corporations exported everything from cheap plastic toy guns to AK-47’s with many of the profits being used to modernize the People’s Liberation Army and prepare it for attacks on Taiwan and beyond.

The latest fruits of our labor? A report in the New York Times that 24 million of the spring-wound plastic paper clips had been seized and destroyed by U.S. Customs officials. The products had been made by unpaid prison inmates, many of whom worked until their fingers were bloody. And their overlords stood to reap a fortune in profits.

Only the actions of a brave cameraman who smuggled film footage of the factory to the U.S. news media spurred our government into action. One wonders how many other shipments, how many other factories and how many other slaves will be ignored as the big business of corporate/government graft continues out of western sight and out of mind.

It's pretty clear to me...free trade and slave labor don't mix.

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