General Discussion

Ideally there would be a balance between a global system of fair trade and healthy competition that benefits everyone. But since any system is not perfect we have to look for the least imperfect, and make the best of it.

Given that we have to do that, i would prefer to have nations competing for theor own economic self interest than all nations bending over and taking it in the butt to enrich Multinational Big Money, which is what the current system of so-called free trade is all about.

Yes ultimately the lower segment henefits, but only in terms of relative poverty. Something is better than nothing. But it also has bad consequences and creates many setbacks for tye actuak peopke and domestic economies of the developing world.

I realize this article is a few years old, but it illustrates the kinds of problem NAFTA, TPP agreements cause.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/business/worldbusiness/24peso.html
“A new phenomenon has grown up under Nafta — high-productivity poverty,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

What, IMO, is really the issue is philosophy, ethical social values and structural reforms to make it preferable to do the right thing everywhere.

I realuze thats broadenong it out, but that is what is really the stakes.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-free-trade-and-the-loss-of-us-jobs/2014/01/14/894f5750-7d59-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html

By avoiding discussion of the consequences that trade deals with developing nations have on U.S. workers, not to mention our trade balance, defenders of free trade are indulging in the worst kind of imperviousness to facts. But when the case for free trade is coupled with the case for raising U.S. workers’ incomes, it enters a zone where real numbers, and real Americans’ lives, matter. In that zone, the argument for the kind of free-trade deal embodied by NAFTA, permanent normal trade relations with China and the Trans-Pacific Partnership completely blows up. Such deals increase the incomes of Americans investing abroad even as they diminish the incomes of Americans working at home. They worsen the very inequality against which the president rightly campaigns.

There are ways that a developed nation can trade with the developing world without gutting its own economy. Germany has been able to protect its workers not only through the advantage of having the euro as its currency, but also by requiring its corporations to give their employees a major say in their companies’ investment decisions and by embracing a form of capitalism in which shareholders don’t play a major role. Were the United States to adopt this form of stakeholder capitalism, then its trade accords wouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of its workers. Absent such reforms, however, trade deals will only negate our attempts to diminish inequality.