Overall, the Group of 20 leading economies, whose leaders meet Sunday, have resorted to so-called “trade distortions” 40% more frequently in the first 10 months of 2015 than they did last year, economists Simon Evenett and Johannes Fritz wrote in a Global Trade Alert report published by the Center for Economic Policy Research in London.
And I wonder if a lengthy “free trade agreement” doesn’t actually add to the distortions, rather than subtract from them.
The trade agreement that I want doesn’t need foreign cooperation. Let me import and buy anything which a foreign producer wishes to offer.
What is in those 6,500 pages of trade agreement? Does anyone know? I’ll guess about some components.
–> Deals where my right to buy freely is held hostage by US manufacturers who want to force other countries to accept US goods. “We will let you sell to our people if we can sell to your people.” The problem with that: I didn’t assign my rights to US manufacturers so that they could negotiate to their advantage.
–> Treaty arrangements pasted into this deal to impose new law on US residents, law which would not be created through the US legislative process. Possibly gun control as a condition of maintaining freer trade.
It includes a section that tries to impose the worst of US intellectual property laws onto the members of the TPP agreement. For example, copyright extended to lifetime + 70 years (grandfathering in all existing works), and making circumvention or reverse-engineering of any sort of “protected” works illegal (even if just for your own use).
To be clear, I was referring to parts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.