Falkvinge must be a mainstream politician now. He's pandering to the base with ad hominems while foregoing the opportunity to make an intellectual case :) I w

Falkvinge must be a mainstream politician now. He's pandering to the base with ad hominems while foregoing the opportunity to make an intellectual case :) I want to try and understand. On the WTO "having moved ahead from that failure with disguising lopsided rent-seeking schemes as “free trade agreements”. The first of these was the WTO" He seems to think his audience will just know what this means. I admit I don't have WTO objections filed away in my (libertarian-leaning) subconscious under "obviously true, no need for explanation." According to Wikipedia [1], objections include "-Rich countries are able to maintain high import duties and quotas in certain products, blocking imports from developing countries (e.g. clothing); -The increase in non-tariff barriers such as anti-dumping measures allowed against developing countries; -The maintenance of high protection of agriculture in developed countries while developing ones are pressed to open their markets; -Many developing countries do not have the capacity to follow the negotiations and participate actively in the Uruguay Round" These actually seems like quite legitimate political gripes to me, and they fit with what I know. There are also structural reasons people object to the neoliberal opening of markets, in a big bang release [Martin Khor, 2] "The problem in trade liberalisation is that a country can control how fast to liberalise its imports (and thus increase the inflow of products) but cannot determine by itself how fast its exports grow. Export growth partly depends on the prices of the existing exported products (and developing countries have suffered from serious declines in their tenns of trade) and also on having or developing the infrastructure, human and enterprise capacity for new exports (which is a longterm process and not easily achieved)." So that's at least an interesting and intelligible set of claims that one can debate with empirical evidence. I don't know what I conclude from them, but its too bad the rhetoric tends to be so substance-free given how important it is. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_World_Trade_Organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_World_Trade_Or... [2] http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/davos2-cn.htm http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/davos2-cn.htm Edit: formatting