This is spot on and one of the reasons why I think that running countries on a timescale of four year election cycles will not work in the very long term. It almost guarantees short sighted policies especially if there are no term limits or multiple runs for the incumbents. This is a very hard problem to solve, we've settled on democracy as the least of a bunch of bad solutions but we have yet to find something better and this more or less is baked into the system.

Free trade did the world a lot of good. At the same time it caused a lot of problems, mostly offset by the good but not all of it. It's a bit like controlling a model airplane before the days of proportional control. You get to 'yank the lever' every so often and you always end up overcorrecting. And that's before we get into even more complex issues such as corruption (which is part and parcel of every political system in one form or another) and simply dealing with human nature.