There are times when your advocacy for something ties you up in such knots that you ignore the facts of the case in pursuit of your advocacy. I think that’s the case with the Washington Post editorial in support of the incipient Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. After remarking on the benefit of trade they write:
In any case, the world’s biggest alleged currency manipulator, China, is not a party to the agreement.
That’s incorrect, both formally and practically. Formally, the United States continues to have a “One China policy”. That means that as a matter of policy the U. S. believes there is only one China, not a mainland China and Taiwan. Since Taiwan is a party to the negotiations, as a matter of policy China is a party to it.
However, practically it’s false as well. As a consequence of the way so many Taiwanese companies operate when you do business with them you’re doing business with China. That’s a problem with the agreement that hasn’t been mentioned. China is the elephant in the room. Any agreement that includes Japan and Taiwan but doesn’t include mainland China will give the mainland the benefits of the agreement without demanding it change its policies. That seems like a basic problem to me.
There’s also a logical problem with editors’ criticisms. Although they object to opposing an agreement when we don’t know the terms to it, they don’t recognize that it’s equally problematic to support the agreement. It’s no more illegitimate to critique in advance than it is to advocate in advance.
I don’t oppose a trade agreement in principle, a position the editors attribute to unnamed progressives. Unlike the editors I recognize that the TPP is not a free trade pact but a managed trade one, we need to negotiate a deal in which trade is managed in our favor, and in the U. S.’s typical haste to embrace neoliberal policies I’m not confident that’s the case. I’d rather see tariffs that protect ordinary American workers at the expense of a little GDP than managed trade in the form of the TPP that increases GDP at the expense of ordinary workers.
There is no amount of job training, productivity enhancement or capital intensity that can make American goods competitive with a country that devaluea its currency 15-20% relative to our own. Exchange rate is by far the biggest factor in our ability to sell things to foreigners, so of course the Post breezily dismisses it. And contrary to their claims, to my knowledge input by lobbyists was not treated as classified information by previous presidents. The sole reason for doing so is that anyone outside the Washington elite would hate it.
The writing in this editorial is so disingenuous, so laden with hair-split language and so emotional it borders on professional malpractice.
The writing in this editorial is so disingenuous, so laden with hair-split language and so emotional it borders on professional malpractice.
hey, it could be an editorial on immigration!