Negotiations for the TPP agreement should be abandoned

If free trade were so amazing, there would be no need for a silly agreement that takes ages to work out. The fact is that there are brilliant reasons for restricting trade, foremost among them that free trade is a total failure.Economic impacts on individualsThe reason why governments impose restrictions on trade is to protect local people, their economic security, their society and their environment. This is important and usually legitimate. For example, when multinationals buy up or trade in local sectors, their profits go offshore and are rarely reinvested. This is coupled with a typical increase in consumption in these countries as trade drives prices down. The result is a huge capital outflow that reduces the funds available to employers, reducing wages. Unsustainable imports cannot be sustained - that's a tautology.If that sounds familiar to any US citizens, it's because free trade isn't the only way to make things affordable while stealing the profits - currency controls can do the same thing. As people from the US know, China has a longstanding policy of gaming their currency to ruin your markets by making their decent-quality stuff affordable (alongside policies like having poor working conditions for their people). 70% of America's GDP is consumer spending, most of that is foreign spending, and most of that is to China, so the USA's primary business is currently "making China richer". Now you guys want even cheaper stuff by opening yourselves up to more competition from countries like Japan. The result is that many of the USA's manufacturing jobs are now lost to the Chinese. It makes things more affordable at the checkout, but you don't realise the flow-on effects to your wages. It affects everyone, even those who are not in competition with foreign countries.Tying prices to world prices has another big issue - world prices are really volatile compared with what the price would be locally. This leads to some pretty absurd arrangements, such as the fact that New Zealand milk is currently relatively cheaper in Europe than it is in NZ. But more dangerously, if one country (say, I don't know, Brunei or Mexico) falls into a financial crisis, that affects price signals everywhere else rather than in just that one country, allows for quicker capital outflows, etc. If we are one global village and there's a plague, we all die. If we are a team of villages protecting our interests, we are as a whole stronger. These are the kinds of legitimate reasons governments impose restrictions on trade.Social costsWithout these protections, governments create a race to the bottom. With no protections, multinationals invest in countries that are the most profitable for them, which is another way of saying the cheapest. While they exploit the poor people in some poor country, other countries start to attempt to attract investment as they become poor. Governments (usually) reduce standards as well as civil and political liberties. When business is able to dictate the behaviour of the government in this way, then governments cease to be democratic. They become corporatist, out of necessity and survival. This might not be so big an issue for America, but most of the negotiating countries here are actually democratic. Democracy beats plutocracy all people are equal and all people matter - not just those who happen to head the big companies in pursuit of short-term profits.There's a myth that trade can be deregulated and made more efficient. Trade cannot be deregulated - when governments lose control, corporations have all the power of international trade. The economic problem is that trade is driven by price signals, but price signals do not signal externalities. Trade makes things more affordable in dollar terms, but the other costs - to the environment, to the workers etc - are not included. This is WHY free trade drives prices down - it hides the costs away for future generations to worry about - in fact, it PROHIBITS governments from signalling the true price of goods not for people's benefit, but for the benefit of megacorporations. In almost every case where free trade has led to an ongoing profit, it has come at the cost of some nonrenewable natural resource in that country (such as the case of America and Australia's free trade agreement, which has lost Australia a lot of uranium, the US a lot of money, and the world a lot of nuclear security), which is one of the most pernicious costs since it can never be restored or repaid.So under free trade, because of the lack of protections, the only way you can get money is by destroying yourself, and the only way you can spend money is to - well, destroy yourself. It's a lose-lose.If a country was to gain by having free trade, then I'm all for the government allowing free trade. They don't need a free trade agreement to have free trade. But FORCING governments to a policy of free trade when, barring extraordinary circumstances, it is really bad economics to do so, is probably a really bad idea.Corporate structureFor those who are NOT megacorporations, more foreign control of the market means more imperfect competition, since only large competitors will fight seriously overseas. Couple that with the fact your customers have less to spend as profits are taken offshore and layoffs happen, the only business position that is advantageous is as a shareholder or director of one of the big companies. It's no secret that countries with freer trade, such as the USA, also tend to be more monopolistic, and small business often has a hard time even getting off the ground. That actually undermines innovation and competition in the local economy, instead making the whole economy compete against other economies just to survive. And in the battlefield, local businesses are the ones in the firing line.To combat this, economists have come up with a silly theory they call "comparative advantage". Megacorporations might be pillaging you over there, but you can sell them something else over here so it's all good. Not true. First, it's still exploitation in the name of megacorporation profits, and smaller corporations missing out on the profits they would have otherwise received. Second, that's an unusual case. Most of the time factors of production simply are not mobile enough to randomly switch industries just because big fish say so. If you've been a farmer your whole life, and now your country has only a comparative advantage in accounting, then all your cows, sheds, land and skills don't really provide any ability to switch. Third, megacorporations exist in almost every industry, leaving no little niches for small players to get their comparative advantages in. At most you can target some kind of premium model where you convince people to pay more because "it's local". That's naturally and economically counter-intuitive to any rational customer - why should they have to pay more for a business with no real superior value? The answer, of course, is that the stuffing up of price signals has screwed over local business too.That's not allEvery leak so far has made it very clear that this is not just a free trade agreement. The very fact that it is secret - which is rare with such negotiations - is undemocratic and highly suspect. These kinds of agreements allow executive branches of government to avoid the legislature, reducing transparency and undermining the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. The kinds of provisions we're talking about here include controversial IP measures which eliminate things like fair use, making ALL capital controls illegal (not just trade) and ending many simple restrictions governments put on alcohol and tobacco sales (see http://tppinfo.org...). Even if it was just what it claimed - a simple free trade agreement - then that would be bad. Increasingly, however, it seems unlikely that this is the case.The resolution is affirmed.