Trust Me, Charlie Brown
So why did the three agreements take years to draft, why are they collectively thousands of pages, and why do their contents have to remain secret? Because they probably have little to do with free trade. The countries that have the most to gain from international free trade are those that most closely approach domestic free trade, or capitalism. The statist panoply of regulation, taxes, sovereign debt, coerced income redistribution, government-provided goods and services, fiat money, interest rate suppression, and currency devaluation—all the things modern governments and their central banks do to their economies and people—cripple competitiveness. Free trade exposes competitive weakness, which casts suspicion on the motives of the governments—all statist to the core—negotiating the current agreements.
This is an excerpt, for the full article click the link above.
This is an excerpt, for the full article click the link above.
Almost exactly right. The only thing missing is that the men behind the curtain pulling the strings are not elected or appointed government employees. They are international corporate CEOs who love their government granted monopoly powers, desire to cripple (and to make illegal ) any sovereign attempts to expose dangers to customers in company products, and love to squash all competition and innovation using government decree. Government employees may be sitting at the negotiation table, but their scripts are written by CEOs and their chief legal counsels. .