11/13/15 – David S. D’Amato – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Sorry, man, I had to cut Jim short.
I like talking with Jim.
But we'll have him back soon.
But now it's time for David S. D'Amato from the Future of Freedom Foundation, FFF.org.
He is an attorney in international law and business and a libertarian writer.
This one appeared at BleedingHeartLibertarians.com.
Should libertarians support the TPP?
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, David?
I'm great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, yeah, good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
And listen, I'm lazy and stupid, man.
I never read the leaked text.
And I know WikiLeaks has leaked portions here, there, and the other thing.
And I think I read last week or earlier this week that all of it, they finally posted the whole thing online.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, yeah.
Now it's pretty much looking like it's going to be a done deal.
The countries have acceded to it.
And now it just needs to go through each party's sort of domestic process for however they approve international agreements.
And is there much of a debate going on in D.C.?
Or it's pretty much a done deal there as far as Congress goes?
You know what?
Yeah.
From where I sit, it looks like the interests have sort of prevailed again.
And this one is going to be lost.
Yeah.
Predictable enough there.
All right.
But now take us back and forgive me for not knowing too much about it.
I did think it was funny.
I want to give a little bit of credit to Rand Paul for calling out Donald Trump and all his bluster in the debate the other night.
When he said, what are you talking about, man?
China isn't even part of the TPP.
And I thought that was funny that Trump was going, China, man, they really screwed us on that deal.
And he obviously doesn't know anything about it whatsoever.
Just like he says the same thing about the Iran deal.
He couldn't tell you a single detail in it.
But anyway, so tell us the details.
What is it?
And you know what?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that at least half the audience thinks that it must be a pretty good thing or else why would they do it?
Right, right.
So I'll just give the 30,000 foot view for anyone listening who's not an attorney and not an expert in international law or intellectual property law.
So it's a treaty.
It's an international agreement that has a variety of provisions on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with intellectual property.
But I've focused on the intellectual property pieces of it because from where I sit, intellectual property law is not, we can't reconcile it with libertarian principles.
And so what intellectual property attempts to do is, or what it does, is grant limited monopoly rights to certain content creators, meaning inventors or authors.
And the reason why I think that this is irreconcilable with libertarianism is because really what those laws do is tell you and I how we're allowed to use our own private property.
And so what it purports to do is give the ownership over an idea, which is impossible actually.
So what it really does is give partial ownership to someone else over, say, your pen and paper or materials that you have in your garage, let's say.
All right.
Now, so is this a different kind of regime of intellectual property than what we've had all along around here?
In other words, is this something that the average American wouldn't find any reason to object to, only hardcore anarchists like you and me?
No.
So it's different for a couple of reasons.
The U.S. has very exacting and strict intellectual property rules domestically.
And what this agreement does is extend some of those rules to other countries where there might have been more freedom in this space.
So, for example, one of the big concerns and one of the things that's been most controversial has been the way that the TPP deals with pharmaceutical patents.
So, for instance, in a lot of these, I think it's 11 countries plus the U.S.
In a lot of these 11 countries, it was relatively easy to make, for example, a generic drug that they could ship around the world and that consumers of drug products could have cheap and easy access to.
And now with the TPP, the U.S. has sort of used its muscle as a trading partner and its bargaining power in that way to extend some of the very worst imaginable terms around pharma patents.
So, in other words, they're going to be taking the poorest people in the world who right now are barely able to afford the medicines they need and they're going to take their medicines away.
Yeah, exactly.
And to their credit, some of the countries that negotiated the TPP with the U.S. resisted some of the attempts by the U.S. and the U.S. pharma industry to extend these terms.
But they don't have the muscle to stand up to the U.S. as a trading partner because the United States, as a percentage of world GDP, is so important that they sort of need to get in line.
And that's what's happening here.
Yeah.
Well, so, yeah, who needs a one world government under the U.N. when you have Washington, D.C. to rule them all?
Yeah, no, it's very true.
I mean, and they've been sort of negotiating this largely in secret and not to sound too spooky or conspiratorial about it, but these negotiations were held in secret over the past, I guess, it's probably been a decade now.
And industry groups like, again, the pharma industry certainly had access to the negotiating table.
And I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't.
Yeah, no, of course not.
None of us ever do.
And then that's also why they always do the fast track.
So Congress can't try to change anything.
They can only vote it up or down.
And so at the end of the day, they always vote it up.
Right.
I mean, and that's what's sort of remarkable about this, too, is even elected officials.
And, you know, I'm no fan of sort of the electoral system and the democratic system that we've got going on in the U.S.
But even elected officials really had very little access to the language and the negotiation process until late in the game.
So it really was kind of just industry groups across international lines making sure that the U.S., the American draconian system of intellectual property is spread, you know, all across these Pacific Rim countries.
And now, so from the libertarian point of view, all intellectual property is just protectionism?
Well, you know, there's a big split in libertarianism about this question.
And I've written a whole bunch about sort of the debate and the terms of the debate.
Many libertarians are actually strong proponents of intellectual property protections.
And that comes from sort of people like Ayn Rand, who come from a good place of wanting to value the creator and protect the creator.
And that's completely understandable, and it makes sense on its face.
But the problem is, as I said, what intellectual property rights purport to do is not really what they do.
They purport to protect inventors and authors.
What they really do is give those people limited rights over what you're allowed to do with things that you own.
Right.
Which is just really a more accurate way of looking at it, the way that nobody ever describes it.
But once you do, then you kind of see the hole in the other's argument pretty big right there.
It's pretty big.
Yeah, exactly.
Because, right, to me, that's the way we ought to look at it.
Because, of course, if you say, well, I'd like to protect inventors and I want a society that puts a high value on new innovation and spurs that on, then it's impossible to disagree with.
But if you sort of show how intellectual property rights like patents and copyrights actually function, then people start to say, oh, well, yeah, I sort of didn't really think about it that way.
Right.
Well, and, you know, that's the thing about it when you get to, as you were saying, the level of these international agreements where no little guys anywhere, including even some of the national governments involved, really have much of a say in it.
The industry groups are more powerful than the national governments doing the negotiation in many cases, and then, of course, completely own and control America's position in the thing.
And so what we're really talking about in practice is gangsterizing the hell out of a lot of the third world poor.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And you're completely right that, you know, the industry groups involved, I mean, if you compare U.S. pharma, you know, big pharma here in the U.S. to a country like Brunei.
I mean, of course, of course, U.S. pharma, it's a country in its own right.
I mean, and of course it has more bargaining power than one of those smaller nations that's going to be a party to this.
They're just going to get run.
Basically, the U.S. and its interests are going to run roughshod over those little those little countries and they're going to fall in line eventually one way or another.
All right, so that is David Estimado.
He is an attorney in international law and business.
He writes for the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
And then this one is at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
Should libertarians support the TPP?
Thanks very much, David.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
It was a great pleasure.
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