October 01, 2015
Elites like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). After all, it was designed to redistribute more income to sectors like the pharmaceutical industry, the financial industry, and the entertainment industry. The point is to use an international agreement to over-ride national and subnational governments that might pass laws to protect workers, consumers, or the environment.
In keeping with this spirit, the NYT touted the virtues of the TPP in an article describing President Obama’s efforts to conclude negotiations and get the deal through Congress:
“For President Obama, who cited the potential agreement during his address this week to the United Nations, success in a negotiating effort as old as his administration would be a legacy achievement. The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would liberalize trade and open markets among a dozen nations on both sides of the Pacific, from Canada to Chile and Japan to Australia, that account for about two-fifths of the world’s economic output.”
This paragraph tells readers that the NYT really really likes the TPP. After all, legacy achievement is pretty damn good. Does it beat out the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reform, the stimulus that helped pull the economy out of the trough of the recession?
Apart from this editorializing, the rest of the paragraph is not true. While the countries in the TPP do account for two-fifths of the world’s economy, it is not clear that it would “liberalize trade” between most of the countries. The United States already has trade agreements with most of the other countries in the TPP, including Mexico, Canada, and Australia. In these cases, most of the barriers to trade have already been eliminated. Even the barriers with other countries are already low in most cases. This means that the TPP will do little to lower trade barriers.
On the other hand, a quite explicit purpose of the deal, as noted in this article, is to increase protectionism in the form of longer and stronger patent and copyright protection. Perhaps the NYT likes these forms of protectionism, but they are still protectionism. This means that it is wrong to say that the TPP will liberalize trade. It is entirely possible that the net effect of the deal will be to increase the size of the trade barriers between the countries in the pact.
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