There’s one sentence in Michelle Wein’s RealClearPolicy post on trade that I agree with wholeheartedly and it’s from Joseph Stiglitz:
Perhaps no one articulates the neo-Keynesian perspective better than Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently argued in Project Syndicate that “the negotiations to create a free-trade area between the U.S. and Europe, and another between the U.S. and much of the Pacific … are not about establishing a true free-trade system. Instead, the goal is a managed trade regime — managed, that is, to serve the special interests that have long dominated trade policy in the West.”
The emphasis is mine. As I’ve written before, you can write a free trade agreement on a cocktail napkin. When a “free trade agreement” runs to thousands of pages you can be confident that it’s a lot more about picking winners and losers.
The balance of Ms. Wein’s post promotes trade agreements that secure intellectual property as being in the U. S. interest:
In the 21st-century knowledge economy, this means agreements that allow for effective intellectual-property enforcement and prohibit new mercantilist practices (such as forced technology transfer, data-residency requirements, and standards manipulation). It also means our nation should neither be indifferent to its industrial mix nor try to preserve its existing mix indefinitely. Rather, trade policy should be a means to drive U.S. global competitiveness in the knowledge-based industries of the future. In other words, computer chips are more important than potato chips.
I’m skeptical. Naive as I am, I think that anything that subsidizes the ownership of assets (as opposed to labor) is in the interests of the assetholders rather than the more general interest.
I find the degree to which our language has been debased truly frustrating. There is no liberty interest in intellectual property. Indeed, a close reading of the Constitution shows that the Founders were well aware of that but held an antiquated and obsolete notion of the process by which ideas are created, a view that made sense in the age of Mozart or Napoleon but is not nearly as obvious in the age of Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel.
I have a question for Ms. Wein. Do long terms and strict enforcement of patents and copyrights “promote the progress of science and useful arts” or detract from it? Please provide objective evidence. I think the evidence favors the negative.
