As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.

Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.

These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?

Please, give me some credit. Who assumes that any nation's population, or any sufficiently large group of people, really, is a homogeneous, uniform, or monolithic in their opinions? I certainly don't.

Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.

So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.