386 -- NAFTA is not designed to foster free trade or economic progress

Consider again the case of NAFTA, an agreement intended to lock Mexico into an economic discipline that protects investors from the danger of a "democracy opening." It is not a "free trade agreement." Rather, it is highly protectionist, designed to impede East Asian and European competitors. Furthermore, it shares with the global agreements such antimarket principles as "intellectual property rights" restrictions of an extreme sort that rich societies never accepted during their period of development, but that they now intend to use to protect home-based corporations: to destroy the pharmaceutical industry in poorer countries, for example-and, incidentally, to block technological innovations, such as improved production processes for patented products allowed under the traditional patent regime. Progress is no more a desideratum than markets, unless it yields benefits to those who count.