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Comment by oculusthrift | Hacker News Reader

Not everything is done for blue collar rust belt people. TPP is about the US as a whole. Instead of us setting the terms of trade in the Asian Pacific, we will have China and Russia cut their own deals and cut America and its allies out. Entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt would rather help themselves with protectionist policies to give them no skill jobs instead of help the rest of the country and the world.

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Or, you know, they could develop trade deal without all the secrecy and bullshit?

When the government has been lying to you for years about domestic spying, among other things, how do you expect them to follow you blindly on another deal made in the dark?

This country is going to go into chaos in the next ~10-25 years as more and more jobs are automated, unemployment skyrockets, and people refuse to give free money to all the "entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt." Notwithstanding the effects of global warming ramping up.

Except because of the elitism we get to start this period with Donald Trump at the helm instead of someone at least half sane.

Trade deals are developed in secret for the same reason that all legislation is (before being presented for a democratic vote). The negotiation process is hamstrung by too many interests, with domestic lobbies preventing anything from being discussed at all. This is a point of interest in game theory. Paper here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785

I can't believe you get down-voted for stating the obvious; so many otherwise-smart people jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon for this one. Lots of bad parts to TPP, but the "secrecy" was not one of them.

You are being distracted by irrelevancies if you think this was the main issue. And probably quite foolish if you think democracy means 100% of people give their input to 100% of decisions.

Those pesky voters, getting in the way of any decent democratically elected Congress! I quite agree, all legislation should be formulated in secrecy and foisted on them at the last moment.

The only thing that could improve this situation is that deals should be formed in complete secrecy, with no input from Congress or the Senate and should be ratified solely by the President via a treaty process.

You really want to ensure the Great Unwashed and those incompetents they elect indirectly don't get any where near trade deals, otherwise they might possible make "improvements" such as forcing through openness, accountability, fairness and equality! All of which are totally the anathema of good backroom deals.

The US constitution was another document planned in secrecy and passed by the public. This isn't denigrative of democracy at all, despite the flowery rhetoric. It just leads to better outcomes, as Putnam's paper outlines.

It's a pretty seminal work, I'd encourage reading it.

(8000+ citations, https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=view_citatio... )

Thank you, I'll have a read of that. It is interesting that these better outcomes were achieved because the gigantic amount of work that was done in secret is now being overturned because of serious and legitimate complaints about the terms of the agreement. That doesn't sound like a particularly good outcome at all!

This is the tariff elimination schedule for the US in the TPP. It's 386 pages long. If each of the industries effected by it were able to voice their concerns publicly/politically rather than simply furthering their interests in closed negotiation, any trade deal would be politically untenable. The alternative outcome doesn't exist.

http://dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/tpp/official-documents/D...

The fact remains, the TPP is about to be completely undone. That's not exactly particularly effective.

To me secrecy sort of makes sense because it's a negotiation.

You don't want to show your cards in a negotiation, right? So how could the President and Congress say to the American people "this is what we're going to offer and accept from China" and pretend that the Chinese aren't going to hear it too?

Secrecy is often a horrible idea but this is a really complicated issue.

Brexit -- do you think it's good or bad? Because that is democracy.

"Entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt would rather help themselves with protectionist policies to give them no skill jobs instead of help the rest of the country and the world."

"Black crack smokers in Detroit would rather help themselves with welfare instead of getting a job and helping the rest of the country."

Wow, doesn't that really make you think? Maybe we shouldn't target people by their race, and associate them with negative stereotypes? Maybe we shouldn't dismiss their response to struggle as selfish and stupid? Really gets the noggin goin'.

The problem was the "white heroin users" part. "Selfish and stupid" can't really be argued against.

As for selfish. Since everybody's acting in their own interest selfish is pretty much a given. That's the basis of the whole process. That an act is selfish does not make it bad.

As for stupid, large complex and overarching new legislation taking away tons of rights relating to everything from food to medical treatment from individuals ... and everybody (including the vast majority of Hacker News I might point out) seems to have a problem with this.

This is not a stupid attitude. Why not ?

Start here: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

not everyone is selfish as you claim. I, as well as many mature adults, support higher taxes and work against global warming even though both those things could directly hurt me but are better for the public as a whole. that's the difference i guess.

That is a moral subject so complex you cannot possibly summarize it like this. In most cases "supporting" higher taxes (not by actually paying higher taxes of course, which is explicitly allowed in the tax code exactly to call out people like you) comes with social rewards. Well, talking about it comes with social rewards.

Actually paying higher taxes is so rare and unknown that it baffles anyone you tell that it's actually allowed and that a few people did it.

But in case you don't know, here's how you're supposed to do it: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html

So, did you pay higher taxes, say, last year, or not ? Or does it "matter to you that others wouldn't be contributing equally" or something along those lines ?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/eg...

> TPP is about the US as a whole.

And most of the information I have suggested otherwise.

The problem was that all of the things pertaining to the duties of corporations were optional while things falling on individuals were enforced with the full weight of law.

The people putting together the TPP knew EXACTLY what they were doing and tried to tie together a bunch of unpopular stuff with a bunch of important stuff and ram it all through together.

Given how much effort some of this took to hammer out, they can split the TPP provisions apart and try passing them individually.

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