There's a lot there, and a lot of it is fairly tangential to the game I outline. By free trade, I mean any exchange of a good or service for some other good or service that is not coerced. The point of this essay is to show that even a system of putatively uncoerced exchange can be unsustainable, and can still serve the interests of only the wealthy few.

In general, I am not opposed to more or less unrestricted international trade. I'm far from a protectionist in that sense, but I do think that international trade agreements can suffer from the same failing that is outlined in my game analogy, and thus not beneficial for all parties to engage in. And when trade is coerced through the influence of powerful wealth, I think we can all agree that the results will definitely be bad.