And NAFTA did not have enforceable labor agreements and environmental agreements.

And what I said was we should include those and make them enforceable.

In this portion of the quote, President Obama is stating that the United States should add enforceable rules to NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that require the countries that are included in the agreement (United States, Canada, and Mexico) to maintain certain labor and environmental standards (for the purposes of this article I will ignore environmental regulation as it is more complex than other regulation and needs an article of its own to outline and explain).

NAFTA Logo

The problems with this are numerous.  The United States government should only be concerned with one thing – protecting its citizens’ property and rights.  By demanding that other nations change their laws they do neither of these duties.  In fact, they begin to infringe on the rights of their people to purchase goods they desire because increased regulation of labor and environment will almost certainly increase the prices of many goods.  Having a free trade agreement, which, as I stated earlier, is generally redundant, is almost made void by outlining what must be done in order to actually trade freely.  It is hardly free trade if the agreement forces companies to pay their employees wages that are higher than the employees’ value.  If the consumers of certain foreign goods are not pleased with the labor practices or environmental practices by the foreign companies manufacturing those goods then they will likely either refuse to purchase that good or service or require that the price be lower to purchase it.  This is incentive enough for foreign companies to improve their labor practices or environmental practices.  It is inefficient for a government to decide what its people want, especially when the people it is trying to protect are in another country.  Barack Obama seems to wish to make his constituents pay more so that people in foreign nations can enjoy higher wages.  Doesn’t seem right, does it?