In a Perfect World There Would Be No Free Trade Agreements, Only Sanctions and Embargoes.

Posted on the 02 April 2016 by Markwadsworth @Mark_Wadsworth

Implicit in the very notion of FTAs is the default assumption that national governments can and will block trade between their citizens/businesses and those in other countries, and that by entering into FTAs, national governments graciously grant each other's citizens/businesses the permission to do trade freely.
This is actually madness and completely back-to-front.
In a perfect world, the default assumption would be that anybody can trade with anybody.
(For sure, there will always be import restrictions/bans/quotas on some things (drugs, weapons, creation plants and animals etc) and many products have their own particular rules (such as MOT/road worthiness for cars. But as long as the actual rules for any particular product are sensible, to society's overall benefit and applied consistently to domestic and imported goods, the default assumption ought to be that anybody can buy anything from or sell anything to anywhere, the same as people in Birmingham can buy cheese from Cornwall and people in London can buy cars built in Swindon without needing special permission.)
Of course, in extremis, I can sort of see the political argument for imposing sanctions or embargoes on unfriendly countries, even though these usually backfire horribly i.e. members of the ruling caste still get what they want and the burden is borne by their downtrodden masses.