But you'd be wrong. Wholesale t-shirt blanks can cost as little as $3. The expense is in the printing, the retail side of things, and paying the designer at Thought Bubble who was tasked with the difficult job of creating a mongrel who is at once cute and terrifying. So contemporary global trade is pretty anarchic and unregulated, at least by international institutions and national governments. Much of this has to do with academic economists, mostly in the US and Europe, who have argued with great success that governmental regulation diminishes prosperity by limiting growth. Now, some nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa haven't been particularly keen to pursue free trade, but they've been bullied into it by larger economies with whom they desperately need to trade. So in the past 30 years, we've seen all these emerging markets lowering their tariffs, getting rid of regulation, and privatizing formerly state-run businesses.