Friday 12 August 2016

End those freer-trade daydreams now

 

If anyone had any expectation about freer trade with the US, that was given the formal kiss of death overnight with Crooked Hillary’s declaration:

"I oppose it now, I'll oppose it after the election and I'll oppose it as President," the Democratic nominee told supporters at a factory in Michigan.

Mind you, she’s supported it before and probably will again on alternate Tuesdays, if she thinks there’s votes in it. But with  Duplicitous Donald now her keener on building trade walls around their continent than trade between continents, hopes for freer trade with the US are now genuinely dead.

That announcements like this happen almost casually is simply par for this pretty lumpy course. Face it folks, “it's all just a game to these two. It really doesn't matter which one wins, the outcome will be the same.” In this case, protectionism. By default.

We’d have to hope for Gary Johnson to gain the White House for anything promoting freer trade to be back on the table. Unikely, but not impossible.

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6 comments:

Don Walker said...

Gov'ts make "free" trade agreements, but gov'ts aren't traders. It is about gov't making rules and regulations that free enterprise traders are governed by.That is the unproductive dictating to the productive on how they are allowed to conduct their business.That is not free trade.

paul scott said...

Agree with Don above.

paul scott said...

No one was allowed to know what TPPA was about. Hello Hayek, what do you say again /?

MarkT said...

The rules and regulations are already there. In that context you can only have freer trade via free trade agreements.

Dinther said...

Free trade agreements are like joining an Atheist church.

MarkT said...

You're disregarding the reality of what is already there. The bureaucratic machinery of governments across the world spews out rules and regulations on a daily basis that restricts free trade. Short of a revolution to overthrow these governments, the only way you can get freer trade is via agreements that limit how much they can interfere. Libertarians may well want a world where freer trade is achieved simply by an absence of government saying anything about trade, but in the current context that's not possible - and so the defeat of the TPPA is a step backwards. The TPPA would have put limits on how much the government can interfere, and that is why the left were so against it.