One more thing if NAFTA didn't exist could an American company still move to Mexico anyways? Or would tariffs be a way to discourage it?
Sure they could move to Mexico. And, tariffs would certainly discourage it. But it's not as simple as wages and tariffs, as there is also the tax code which literally encourages businesses to relocate overseas (foreign profits are not taxed, generally). It's complicated, but still, with free trade and no tariffs or import/export quotas and restrictions, beginning in the late 1970s and the 1980s, through free trade globalization, it became possible and attractive for businesses to do business in, to, and from far more countries. Changes in corporate governance and compensation caused U.S. managers to adopt an approach to management that focused attention on the stock price and short-term performance, rather than on the longer term.
As a result, firms invested less in shared resources such as pools of skilled labor, supplier networks, an educated populace, and the physical and technical infrastructure on which U.S. competitiveness ultimately depends. These management actions in turn gave rise to serious social problems (loss of jobs, stagnating income, growing inequality) and eventually a decline of the public sector (an inability to fund health and pensions, or investments in "the commons" such as infrastructure, training, education, and basic research, fields that the private sector had abandoned).
So while free trade is uber good for a corporation's bottom line, and thus for stockholders, it truly sucks for American workers.
We could just build all the flat-screen TV’s here; the price wouldn’t soar (prices are always market driven, regardless of costs, including how much money is spent on advertising, plus you wouldn't have the cost of shipping them here from China), demand wouldn’t plummet, the industry wouldn’t contract sharply, and all those jobs would be preserved, even though they’d cost 7 times as much per worker here as in China. But a sevenfold increase in labor costs would cause a real hit to the bottom line and to the stock price. Building TVs here is good for America and American workers, but not as good for the bottom line of the businesses who make them. Slapping a large tariff on imported flat screen TVs would still see them sold at the market price, but would encourage the makers to shift manufacturing to here instead of imported it.
Hillary Clinton called the Trans Pacific Partnership "the gold standard" of free trade agreements, and then flip-flopped when it became politically necessary and expedient for her to do so (and will flip again if she becomes the president). If you think we import a lot of crap from China now, wait until the TPP gets passed. You can't seen nothing yet. We'll be importing hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet from China.