Trade Deals Are About Increasing Protectionist Barriers

by DEAN BAKER

DECEMBER 19, 2019

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/19/trade-deals-are-about-increasing-protectionist-barriers/

The NYT had a piece describing the departure of the UK from the EU as the end of an era:

“The notion that global economic integration amounts to human progress had a good run, dominating the thinking of the powers that be for more than seven decades. But a new era is underway in which national interests take primacy over collective concerns, with trading arrangements negotiated among individual countries.”

This fundamentally misrepresents past trade policies and totally misrepresents the crux of recent trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Past trade deals were about making it easier to trade manufactured goods, making it as easy as possible for corporations to take advantage of low-cost labor in the developing world. This has the predicted and actual effect of putting downward pressure on the wages of less-educated workers.

The impact of trade was devastating for large segments of the U.S. workforce. It cost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs (20 percent of the total) between the years 2000 and 2007. (It cost almost 40 percent of all unionized manufacturing jobs.) Note, that this was before the Great Recession, which began in December of 2007.

The argument that this was technology and not trade is truly Trumpian and deserves the same sort of derision as Trump’s claims about his “perfect” phone call with Ukraine’s president. We lost relatively few manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 2000, and we have gained a small number since 2010. So the Trumpers arguing for the technology story want us to believe that technology only cost us manufacturing jobs in the years when the trade deficit exploded, but not in the years prior to that or in the years since. Right.

It is also worth noting that the “free traders” have pretty much zero interest in free trade in professional services. Even though we could save on the order of $100 billion a year ($700 per family per year) if we liberalized rules for physicians, and allowed qualified doctors in places like Canada and Germany to practice in the United States, the people who think that “global economic integration amounts to human progress,” have little interest in global integration when it might reduce the living standards of highly paid professionals.

It is also important to point out that the liberalization of trade in goods is largely a done deal. Tariffs are already zero or near zero in the vast majority of cases. The potential gains from further liberalization are limited, especially since goods are a rapidly falling share of total output.

Instead, deals like the TPP are largely about locking in rules on items like intellectual property protection and preserving Mark Zuckerberg’s dominance of the Internet. The TPP, like other recent trade deals, calls for longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies.

These protections are 180 degrees at odds with free trade. They are about shifting more income from the bulk of the population to people who benefit from rents on patents and copyrights, by making them pay more for drugs, medical equipment, software and a wide variety of other items.

The deals also look to lock in existing rules on the Internet, making it more difficult for both the United States and other countries to regulate Internet behemoths like Facebook and Google. Perhaps most importantly, these deals enshrine Section 230, which protects Facebook and other Internet intermediaries from facing the same liability for circulating libelous material as print and broadcast outlets. This has nothing obviously to due with economic integration, but it is likely to make Mark Zuckerberg richer.

This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.