We don’t know what’s in it, so it could be a multi-national version of “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it”. Megan McArdle manages to raise one cheer for the agreement:
I’ve spent the morning reading about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I went in prepared to deliver a column full of details, winners and losers, strong opinions about the good provisions and the bad. But what really comes to mind is a dismal thought: “Is this the best we can do?”
Oh, yes, I know the statistics. Forty percent of the world’s economy. Thousands of tariffs falling. I know the opposition points too, about giveaways to business, intellectual property rules, outsourcing jobs. No one is talking about the larger story, though, which is that the biggest trade news in a decade involves a regional deal of relatively limited impact.
It was not always thus. When I was a fledgling journalist, a wee slip of a thing, we economics writers looked to major global trade negotiations to advance the cause of freer markets, and not incidentally, the material progress of mankind. We looked down on regional side-deals because they were such weak tea compared with the robust brew of a global agreement. Regional deals distorted the flow of trade, encouraging people not to exploit comparative advantage and production capabilities, but rather to seek the best combination of tariff rules from among competing regional frameworks. I have heard arguments that such deals, by distorting trade and weakening the pressure to make global deals, were actually worse than doing nothing. Indeed, I may have made such arguments.
You don’t hear those arguments any more, and that’s because we free-traders have largely given up on global trade agreements. The Doha round of World Trade Organization talks collapsed in the face of European agricultural protectionism and intransigence among countries with large numbers of subsistence farmers. Nativism, protectionism, nationalism seem to be rising as a political force in many countries. Global trade volumes are looking anemic. In this climate, regional agreements seem attractive, in much the same way that the remaining bar patrons assume a winsome glow around closing time.
How have things come to such an unpretty pass?
To answer Megan’s question: These are no longer just trade agreements. These are attempts to solve society’s ills as perceived by the political class. Embedded in the TPP will be all kinds of social justice issues and climate change rules and regulations. This is also an attempt to forge a world government. They don’t care that the agreement is anemic. What it does is set the framework for intergovernmental regulation that can be built upon. There will be a commission set up to ensure that the agreement’s rules are held to and this commission will be able to over ride national governments. At least this is what was leaked around Washington.
Comment by Wallhouse Wart — October 7, 2015 @ 06:37