Well my option is to remove the possibility of labour cost arbitrage through tariffs/customs duties.

Like, I'm Irish, so I have benefited from this trend for my whole life, but that doesn't make it right.

It's not as simple as 'outsourcing good for capital, bad for labor.' It's been a stupendously positive change for foreign labor in countries that successfully ran low-cost export industries.

Literally hundreds of millions of people in the Third World to were able to raise themselves into the global middle class over the past few decades.

The main people hurt by the outsourcing trend have been middle-class people in wealthy countries who had well-paid, lower-skill jobs producing physical things which are now shipped in from far away.

Good for foreign labor, good for capitalists, and bad for the middle class in rich countries.

This could have even been a win-win-win, if managed more carefully — Germany had pretty robust job retraining programs for people who lost factory jobs. I'd imagine the UK did not.

You're operating under the assumption that hundreds of millions of people in the Third World could not possibly have raised their living standards in any way whatsoever rather than the offshoring of the First World's labor-intensive industries as part of a decades-long political program of wage repression in the First World.

There was a win-win-win available and it didn't happen.

We should be honest about who benefited, as well as who was hurt.

>You can, but should you?

Yes. Trade is supposed to mean that no side of the bargain loses. If my country's working class loses, I'm losing. It's not our job to impoverish ourselves for other people's good.