March 15, 2011
The Washington Post is going into high gear pushing its trade agenda. It ran an editorial that included the term “free trade” in both the headline and the first sentence. While proponents of these deals like to call them “free” trade pacts, this is not accurate. They do little or nothing to reduce the barriers to trade in highly paid professional services, like those provided by physicians and lawyers, and they increase many forms of protectionism, most notably patent and copyright protection.
But the Post wants these deals to pass, so if calling them “free trade” pacts advances the cause, this is a small matter. After all, this is a newspaper that told readers that Mexico’s GDP quadrupled between 1988 and 2007 to make its case that NAFTA was a huge success. The actual growth was 81 percent. Given the paper’s willingness to ignore truth in the pursuit of its trade agenda, calling the pacts “free trade” deals is a relatively minor matter.
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