TPP

Free trade is a tricky issue ... like most government policies, it is cloaked in demagoguery. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become a political football in the current presidential campaign ... mostly engendering scorn from the right and from the left. Obviously, the tight secrecy under which it was constructed is part of the suspicion it invokes. But a classmate of mine, Mort Kondracke,  has written, along with the Dean of the Tuck School of Business, a thoughtful progressive piece on this proposed Eastern trade pact that is worth a read. Since accessing Wall Street Journal articles is tricky, this op-ed is reproduced in Dartblog ... see: Dartblog Repost.

My only addition to this discussion is as follows -- trade protectionism in the form of the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff act of 1930 has been blamed for causing the world's great economic depression of the 1930s. If this be the case, why have not the current equally onerous trade barriers erected by China, the world's second largest economy, also led to a similar depression?