January 19, 2017
The NYT did a great service for the Davos elite in a piece that ostensibly criticized them for being unwilling to support fundamental change that would give more power to ordinary workers. It told readers:
“Davos is — at least rhetorically — consumed with worries about the shortcomings of globalization. About the deepening anxieties of the middle class in many developed economies. About the threat of trade protectionism and its attendant hit to economic growth.”
This is 180 degrees at odds with reality. The Davos elite have been the most enthusiastic supporters of stronger and longer patent and copyright protections. These protections raise the price of the protected items by tens or even hundreds of times their free market price. This is the equivalent of tariffs of several thousand or even tens of thousands of percent. (Davos mainstay Bill Gates is one of the main beneficiaries of this protectionism.)
These forms of protectionism have the same effect on economic growth as the tariffs that supposedly bother the Davos set so much, except their impact is far larger. This is most notable in the case of prescription drugs. The United States spends $430 billion a year on drugs that would likely cost around $60 billion in a free market. While patent and copyrights provide an incentive for research and creative work, there are almost certainly more efficient mechanisms for accomplishing this task. (See my [free] book Rigged, chapter 5.) As an example of a more efficient route, Forbes recently ran a piece arguing for the greater efficiency of a government takeover of the company Gilead Sciences so that it could make its Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi (list price $84,000) available for free to patients.
The Davos elite are just fine with this protectionism and in fact have consistently sought to expand it in trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the TRIPs provisions of the WTO. They seem utterly unconcerned about its negative impact on growth.
The Davos elite are also unconcerned about protectionism that benefits highly paid professionals like doctors and dentists. The United States bars hundreds of thousands of highly qualified doctors by requiring that they first complete a residency program in the United States. As a result of this protectionism we pay our doctors twice as much as the average for other wealthy countries, adding more than $80 billion a year to our health care bill.
For these reasons, it is 180 degrees wrong to describe the Davos elite as being opposed to protectionism. While they surely like to be portrayed as free traders, it is not true. They support protectionism as long as it redistributes money from the rest of the world to people like them.
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