Thursday, January 30, 2014

Not Trade

There's enough economist left in me to not be too negative about trade agreements that are actually trade agreements, as in trade agreements which lower tariffs and that's it. But the problem is that what the Washington Post lovingly calls "free trade agreements" usually don't have all that much to do with "free" or "trade" and if you include any notion of democracy they don't involve "agreement." So, yes, kill the monster.

For some reason including labor standards in such agreements is communist, but including absurd intellectual property protections is Freedom Reagan Squared. Because.