One of your premises is that NAFTA isn't a free trade agreement. How do you square that premise with this quote from Wikipedia about NAFTA: "Passage of NAFTA resulted in the elimination or reduction of barriers to trade and investment between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico."?

Do you disagree with this quote? And if not, then what is your definition of free trade?

If the agreement eliminated and reduced some barriers, yet also put in place new barriers, then the quote is still true and the result isn't necessarily free trade (as it is commonly understood).

Well yes, in theory, but I have not seen that demonstration for NAFTA.

In addition to the sibling comment, there's also the question of whether it's only a free trade agreement, or if it also makes other demands. For example, NAFTA allows corporations to sue governments, expanded copyright, cancelled article 27 of the Mexican constitution, which prevented privatization or sale of indigenous communal land, and added "a 10-year data protection period against generic drug production on an expanded list of products that benefits pharmaceutical companies, particularly US makers producers of high-cost biologic drugs", whatever that means.

In other words, the GPs comment of "mighty long document" meant that it doesn't take many pages to write "reduce tariffs on the following goods".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre...

>> reduction of barriers to trade

That's not elimination. A free trade agreement IMHO in laymans terms would be about a paragraph explaining that no party to it will restrict or tax in any way trade between the parties. I would expect good lawyering to expand that to a few pages of legalese. NAFTA was hundreds of pages and carved out particular niches for industries in the US and Canada at least. It might have been less restrictive than whatever was in place before, but it wasn't what I'd call a free trade agreement.

Isn't free trade generally considered bad? Fair trade is the better objective.

If both parties to a trade are free, I'd say free trade is generally fair (otherwise the parties wouldn't come to an agreement and the trade would not happen). If only one side has that freedom to choose, it's possible to make an unfair trade.

No-one has free trade. Most of the time free trade agreements are made in a way that clearly benefits one side, and are an expression of power as much as a fleet with aircraft carriers