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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

This also shows the true evil of the TTP and TTIP trade deals: corporations can sue any government if their laws affect the corporation's profits. Pure evil. The article has the example of Mexico being sued for their protective laws.

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It's not just evil, I presume in the future there will be civil wars because of that - people who'll have enough vs. corporations.

And we'll only have seen it coming in our discussions and fiction for what... almost a century? Total shock!

Unfortunately with AI warfare we might soon be at the point where the are no human soldiers who could rebel and take side of the people.

If you start concentrating the power of the army in fewer and fewer hands, they will become more powerful, not less.

Could you elaborate? I didn't get your point.

I'm cutting past the corporation talk and going straight to the premise. It's one that we need to reject.

The article starts off with the premise that we are currently suffering a health crisis. This is insane. It's an extreme, hyper-negative point of view. We live in the safest times in all of human history. If you're not living in a shanty town without running water and suffering from dysentery, you're doing pretty well. If your sitting in your climate-controlled house in suburbia, sipping your soda thinking "Man, I'm killing myself with this sugary drink", you are choosing to be miserable. You have decided not to enjoy the wonderful world in which we live. You have decided to focus on an oblique health threat that starving humans through out history have dreamed about. Exporting that self-imposed misery to others is impolite at best if not pure evil.

With this kind of hyper-negative thinking, we could advance medicine to the point that we become immortal with eternally youthful regenerating bodies, but we would go hunting for a way for french fries and sodas to still be evil somehow. Like these things are some sort of modern day werewolf.

The premise is laughable at best. Dangerous at worst. It's neither sane nor healthy to think like this.

You mention civil war. The war here would boil down to the noble cause of killing people to protect us from the health threats of sugar. That's insane! We must reject this thinking.

Weird response, to say the least. And from a green account. (takes off tinfoil hat)

Now, what is laughable is this idea of corporations suing governments because of lost profits from legislation.

Happened with cigarettes too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UsHHOCH4q8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVe8wwNMh24

As for the idea of civil war: obvious hyperbole is obvious. Democracy needs fixing, or much larger problems -- but if there is no fixing, corporate corruption might ensure the problems.

It's practically modern culture to be negative about everything. When there are two equally probable outcomes I've noticed that people tend to lavish on the negative one to exclusion and treat people with positive outlooks as annoying, chipper, ignorant, or immature. It's odd. My theory is that positivity requires some claim of responsibility over the outcome while negatively allows one to divorce themselves from it.

I also think it's human nature. Humans are always looking to better themselves. Take someone from 1900 and bring them to 2016. They would think they are living in paradise...for a while. Then they would get used to it and start thinking about everything that's wrong and how to fix it.

Now, on the plus side it's that drive that improves the human condition. But it comes with a lot of negatives too.

And how do you feel about people who "choose" to smoke? Even when doctors said it was safe?

I mentioned civil war because the people will see that the government who is supposed to be there for them is powerless. Combine that with the economic conditions (job shortages, which will even rise with automation), loss of middle class and higher taxes for pensions/welfare (add the uncontrolled immigration to the mix). The history has shown where all this ends.

I just looked up the Mexico dispute and:

>The dispute centered on Mexico's adoption of a 20 percent tax on the use of high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks, Mayer Brown said. The financial impact was significant because Mexico is the world's second-largest market for soft drinks.

>The tax illegally favored Mexico's domestic sugar producers over U.S.-owned producers of high-fructose corn syrup, the firm said.

It doesn't seem totally unreasonable. One of the principles of trade deals is there is a level playing field rather than passing laws to advantage the locals. http://www.law360.com/articles/123636/cargill-wins-77m-from-...

Wouldn't that tax also favor U.S. sugar producers over Mexican producers of HFCS, and favor Mexican sugar producers over Mexican HFCS producers, and favor U.S. sugar producers over U.S. HFCS producers?

It does unlevel the playing field, but the tilt is on the sugar/HFCS axis, not the US/Mexico axis. I don't see why that should not be allowed, unless it can be shown that the US has more HFCS producers and Mexico more sugar producers so that it will disproportionately favor Mexicans AND it was enacted to accomplish that rather for some geographically neutral purpose.

I don't believe there's anything in TTIP that shall directly relate to profits. ISDS schemes are about enforcing adherence to the treaty at hand and ensuring there's no legal/regulatory discrimination of foreign entities. If past agreements are any indication - NAFTA has clear exceptions [0] for measures that are "necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health" as long as it's applied uniformly.

[0] http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/nafta/chap-111.asp

Mexico was sued because they effectively installed a tariff, not just because the law affected the profits of multinationals. They had agreed not to install such tariffs.

The impacts of trade are complex and I don't think we need to run headlong towards laws favoring large corporations, but it's a little over the top to say that it is obvious evil to agree to treat foreign companies equally to native companies. In many situations, trade will benefit everyone. It's not evil to enable and encourage that trade.

>Mexico was sued because they effectively installed a tariff, not just because the law affected the profits of multinationals. They had agreed not to install such tariffs.

That agreement is still for not affecting the profits of multinationals...

(Though of course there is no shortage of "free-market-trumps-all" advocates to point out that such tarrifs hurt the local economy etc).

Sure, big companies are best positioned to take advantage of trade agreements. So what. It still makes sense to examine the totality of the impacts.

For example, I'm pretty curious about what impact NAFTA has had on illegal immigration from Mexico. Who knows if it has been significant, but surely it isn't zero (the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico is down substantially since it passed).

>Sure, big companies are best positioned to take advantage of trade agreements. So what.

So, tremendous stealing of resources from the economy at large, increasing inequality and deterioration of society?

Not enabling sovereign countries to protect industry of their choosing is a form of corporate protectionism. The established companies are protected from future competitors. Example: south koreas industry was bootstrapped by the government using every mean at their disposal - using methods that would probably be improbable in our present form global market. No Samsung, Lg or any of that could arise in current global market. Capitalism and free market are not the only methods to improve economic status - very much like protein is not the only form of food people need to eat.

What's your point? Trade agreements are voluntary. If a country thinks it's better off outside a given trade agreement, it can just leave it behind.

They usually even have an explicit provision for withdrawal. For instance:

http://www.sice.oas.org/trade/nafta/chap-22.asp

So could South Korea use protectionism to build up internal industries today? Sure. But it might not want to, if a different set of choices were more likely to favor South Korea.

I provided as an example a specific case where a country was able to bootstrap its industry using policies favoring national entities, thus creating national wealth and serving all current consumers globally by creating more companies to compete in the global marketplace. The point is, the question about how free some markets should be and for what time - it's not just cronyism vs. healthy competition, or that in every case just serving the most efficient products is a universally best solution, for all time. Economic strategy can use any number of methods, but the current discussion often labels those not respecting the status quo as 'bad players'. But mostly, I was supporting the notion that there can be succesfull or failing national non-conforming strategies. I brought up South Korea as a positive example since there are incompetent renegades - like Venezuela which has achieved an astounding zimbabwe impersonation - that maybe first comes to mind when discussing policies of this sort.

> Trade agreements are voluntary. If a country thinks it's better off outside a given trade agreement, it can just leave it behind.

Completely dismisses the complex reality of how decisions are made within a country. It's possible, even likely, that a system exists that represents the will of a few who benefit over the majority who suffer.

To me, the acts of legally constructed fictitious persons are amoral not evil [or good]. The legally constructed fictitious person is just a messier meat space version of the Etherium fueled Dao. A legally constructed fictitious person has marching orders and those orders are an ends justify the means mandate...as I was writing that I was thinking "constrained only by law" but that's some utopia we don't have.

To me, anthropomorphizing fictitious persons is an intellectual landmine. A fictitious person is an 'it', no more a moral or ethical agent than a rock. A mountain of rock isn't evil when a slide buries a party of hikers. Gravity is a law of natural systems. The behaviors of legally constructed fictitious persons are in accord with the "laws" of those systems.

If a tobacco company say starts giving cigarettes to 5 year olds to get them hooked you don't think that's evil? What difference does it make that a company is a bunch of people rather than one?

I'll give you that it's trickier to deal with bad stuff done by a corporation. With an individual you can jail them but less so with a corp unless you can pin it on an individual.

No. Tobacco companies are not moral agents.

Such a scenario might well involve individuals engaged in banal evil and because individuals are moral agents, that's where blame and praise may accrue.

Anthropomorphizing a tobacco company muddies our thinking. A trade agreement is a document. The consequences of following the ideas in that document may be detrimental. But it is not a moral agent.

Your definition of moral agent is not very useful.

For me, a moral agent is not one that can 'feel responsible', but one that I can affect, by changing my own behavior, when it does 'something bad'.

The discussion of internal states is less useful. Also, the discussion of morality of people I can't affect is less useful.

Not very useful definitions are by definition more useful than useless definitions.

If a person lobs avalanche prevention ordinance upon an unstable mountain slope thereby preventing the demise of the hikers I invented earlier, that person's actions might be said to have affected the behavior of the mountain.

If the person lobs ordinance after the invented hikers have met their fate, that person may well change the mountain slope geometry in such a manner that unique unstable accumulations are no longer physically possible [while others may be].

Clearly neither seems like a case where there is moral agency in the mountain. We get moral agency when the person lobbing ordinance onto the mountain slope is doing or forgoing the activity in the presence of hikers.

Things don't need to be moral agents to be good bad or evil. I had a good bath and a bad haircut but neither of those are moral agents.

Interesting position. This implies that corporations, by default, have no social rights or interests at all -- while humans, by default, have all human rights and interests.

I kind of like this. No free speech or even property ownership rights for corporations, unless we decide it is in our interest. Only humans can be the source of rights or interests.

It will involve a pretty big reworking of the laws, however. Let's get started!

For example since corporations (etc.) have no interests, if their behavior impinges on the interests of even one person that behavior has to be stopped, unless someone can show that that more peoples' interests are served by that behavior than are harmed.

In the case of TPP the attempts to show how it benefits individuals rely on a lot of hypotheticals which doesn't wash if we take this stance. Everyone gains standing to stop corporations if their interests are affected, and the burden of proof is on those who want to permit some corporate behavior that anyone opposes.

The fictitious person legal construct has legal rights and institutional interests. I'm not sure how that maps to social rights and interests.

In any events, rights seem orthogonal to morality. At least if morality constrains some portion of the acts that a moral agent could do because a right is a license for a particular course of action.

Anyway, while changing the laws might produce the greatest benefit and utilitarianism might be a good basis for rational moral action, that's not really my immediate intent. My goal is more pragmatic discussion and less sloganeering.

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