A “free trade agreement” in practice isn’t simply an index card declaring, “Tariffs on Country X are 0 percent, three cheers for Bastiat!” These are managed trade agreements, with hundreds of pages devoted to detailed regulations that smack of top-down Soviet planning.
Some Latin American policymakers seem to think China will offer easy terms for loans and trade agreements. They're wrong. China isn't as rich as many think.
Americans ought to begin thinking of trade between the US and the UK as something comparable to trade between California and Idaho.
Trade agreements have thus become obsolete tokens of negotiation in larger geopolitical disputes, protectionist tools for managing and interfering with global trade flows.
Let the WTO and all its agreements go already! We cannot salvage something that was broken from the start.
EU politicians and technocrats like to present themselves as progressive and enlightened policymakers. But that virtuous mask slipped after German auto giant Volkswagen announced that its new facility would be located in Turkey instead of an EU member nation.
In the second half of the twentieth century, pro-union and anti-trade policies led to a Rust Belt that became uncompetitive, costly, and unable to cope with reality. More protectionism won't save the region now.
Tucker Carlson insists that capitalism is just a "tool" that governments can regulate and manipulate so as to better serve "the people." In practice, this just means one group of "the people" uses government policy to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
Today's tariff policy relies on the fanciful idea that politicians can pull the right levers to make the economy more efficient or more just. As always, the idea is based on fantasy.
In a globalized world, nearly every product or service relies on products and services from somewhere else.
