General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Without endorsing TPP, some things to consider about it. [View all]True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)Its handful of examples of politicians selling NAFTA by saying Mexico would do similar deals with other countries is (a)common sense, and (b)has no relevance to national security arguments. Nebulous rhetoric about "American power" obviously does not apply. Moreover, there is no evidence - none whatsoever - that the US would necessarily be in a better position had NAFTA never occurred.
I say once again: Canada is flourishing, the US apparently still has more than enough manufacturing for people to claim TPP is a threat to it, and Mexicans still want to live in the United States. There are valid arguments that FTAs make internal reforms more difficult, but it's clear that such reforms would have been necessary to avoid the decline in American manufacturing driven by the persistence of Reaganomics giving businesses the cash to relocate. They didn't wait for trade agreements to do that.
Moreover, the document goes on to say TPP would benefit China, and then says arguments that it's necessary to contain China are false because China was offered membership, not noticing the contradiction in the two claims: If it would benefit China and it was offered participation, why did it fail to join?
It also makes a number of sweeping statements without evidence, and that seemingly contradict other sweeping statements also made without evidence. There are also repeated logical fallacies and deceptive statements, trying to spin positive statistics as negative (e.g., spinning other nations increasing investments in the US as the US having a "negative" investment presence in the partner country) or straight-up asserting that a correlation is a causation. I guess the failure of Central America to grow must be due to FTAs rather than MS-13 tearing it to shreds.
Public Citizen needs to get better writers. I could write a better attack on FTAs and I'm not even convinced they're necessarily bad.
The question is not whether the entire world should do this kind of thing. If we got to decide that, I would say we shouldn't - we should do Fair Trade that keeps capital local so that comparative advantage actually applies, and what's traded is limited to goods and services rather than liquidating capital.
The question is whether we should participate in free trade when the rest of the world does this, and it seems somewhat convincing that it's worse to not participate.