Trade
Agreements (can lead to regionalism)
As I am sure you know the Trump Administration is all about
boosting our economy. One of the Trump Administration’s favorite tools for
boosting the economy is through the use of trade agreements. The effort to open
up China to more American products is currently being batted back and forth.
Then there is the USMCA; a trade agreement between the United States, Canada,
and Mexico, which will likely be voted on early in 2020.
These trade deals have tremendous ability to do good or to do
harm. So what makes a trade agreement good-besides the obvious goal of creating
improved economic activity for the participating countries? The answer is
determined by how many and how deep are the strings/legal entanglements, which
tie the member countries together.
You see, if there are too many strings, especially if the
strings revolve around very complicated and likely contentious issues, there is
a great likelihood those strings will at some point chafe one or more of the
involved nations. If that occurs, who decides how the issue is handled? Do the
individual member states decide or is there a higher court? If, there is a
higher court, it will likely supersede the member states’ courts or governing
bodies. If this is the case, national sovereignty and control has been
eliminated and replaced by regionalism.
BREXIT
(an effort to escape regionalism)
The European Union is a perfect example of a very bad trade
deal. You only have had to watch the flood of immigrants from the Middle East
overwhelm the social programs of the EU countries, undermine their native
cultures, and bring a heightened level of violence to know this union of
countries was in trouble on that one issue alone.
That said it should not have been a surprise when several years ago Great Britain’s voted to exit the European Union only to be prevented from doing so by an inability of the EU and Great Britain to agree on how to get untangled from each other. This is why it is such a pleasure to include in this newsletter the victory speech given by Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party since July 2019, who just won control of the British Parliament on the platform of getting BREXIT done. Please, when you read Boris Johnson’s speech, notice within the speech the following statement.
“Leaving the European
Union as one United Kingdom, taking back control of our laws, borders, money,
our trade, immigration system, delivering on the democratic mandate of the
people.
This statement makes it crystal clean, when a country chooses regionalism over national sovereignty, the country and more importantly its citizens sacrifice their freedom to choose their destiny. To read the entire speech, click on this link.
