The TPP monster has 5,544 pages. A real free trade agreement would have 1

Lately the Five Star Free Market label is just a fake seal of approval for something Unfree

Just as carbon trading has nothing to do with a free market, so it is with monster free trade deals like the TPP. The free market meme won the intellectual debate of the 20th Century, but now its good name gets used and abused to sell the idea it defeated – bigger-government.

A real free market deal has only one page and a bunch of signatures. But it takes a lot of pages to list all the unfree parts and to spell it out in sub-sub-clauses that hurt or help thousands of businesses around the world. Who gets the sweetest deal out of the complexity — the card carrying networkers — those who schmooze up to the right minister or bureaucrat. The people who compete on price or quality alone would win in a real free market, and so would we as customers. Instead the document rewards the gatekeepers, the rulemakers, the industry with the best lobbyists and the monied set who can donate enough to the right causes to get a better deal.

Tipping the scales at 5,544 pages — and an astonishing 2,056,560 words — the trade agreement is one of the longest documents The Daily Caller has ever encountered. … The Bible: Authorized King James Version is 1,746 pages.

If it were printed Breitbart estimates it would weigh 100 pounds.

Monster Documents have to stop. The TPP is a hundred pound weapon. There is no single citizen in the West alive today that even knows what the law is that they are supposed to obey — they don’t know if they are breaking the law without paying a lawyer, and often the lawyers are just giving it their best damn guess anyway.

No Senator nor Member could read the document they vote on. Just say “No” to unreadable deals.

Every extra page is a win for the regulating class, the polaracites, the political freeloaders.

Trump vows to axe the TPP, and not a day too soon. Remember the Paris Agreement was toothless, but other legally binding documents can refer back to the Paris deal and make it bite.

The full TPP treaty text can be read here. (How much fun can you have?)

According to Thomas Walkom Canada is better off without the TPP . Notice how there are winners and losers among Canadian industries. Canadian cars down $3.6 billion, Canadian drugs more expensive, whole GDP up barely 0.1%. “

It would have increased the cost of leading-edge drugs and, according to tech entrepreneur Jim Balsillie, crippled Canadian innovation. Balsillie, whose iconic BlackBerry once dominated the world smartphone industry, called the TPP “the worst thing in policy Canada’s ever done.””

So billions are won and lost by different groups, not due to better or worse performance or market demand, but due to decisions by politicians and bureaucrats. And they call it a “free market deal”.

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