Health and safety rules freeze the production side of the economy by erecting impenetrable barriers to entry. All these should be repealed, not entrenched and exported. Yet the side agreements are only elaborations on the crucial section 906 of the agreement's main text. In leaving nothing outside the Nafta commission's purview, this one section gives the whole game away. Vague international secretariats are to be empowered to increase the level of coercive control on the entire economy, including people, pigs, and pimento.
Free trade has a very different message.
It says that if American consumers want to buy something from abroad, they should be allowed to. And American businessmen should be allowed to sell their wares abroad. Tear them all down. And tear down the litany of foreign aid, guaranteed loans, and political manipulation that harms consumers at home and abroad. In section 430 of The Wealth of Nations , Smith made a tragic concession to the mercantilism that animates Nafta's most dangerous provisions.