
Understanding International Trade and Why Trump’s Approach Is Misguided - georgeshi
https://medium.com/discourse/understanding-international-trade-and-why-trumps-approach-is-misguided-b5626a9a3fe1
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deogeo
The article has a somewhat rose-colored view of free trade agreements - in
practice, they tend to include many environment-, worker- and consumer-hostile
clauses (which is predictable, since the agreements are negotiated mainly by
industry representatives). I can't find the source currently, but I believe
one of them (Possibly the TPP?) had a clause where a patent holder could
forbid the export of any item covered by their patent (even after it was
sold). The direct opposite of free trade.

A brief example of the many horrors contained in the for-now dead TPP:
[http://infojustice.org/archives/34189](http://infojustice.org/archives/34189)

And industry representatives defend such terms by saying that they are
'standard' for trade agreements (that they _also_ mostly wrote!), as if that
somehow makes it better, not worse.

