I am an American in my Principles and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”
With these politically incorrect words, written in a letter to Baron William Mure of Caldwell during the turmoil of 1775, the Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) forever became an honorary American citizen. And by his influence, he became an uninvited but welcomed delegate to the American Constitutional Convention.
Hume’s good friend and executor of his literary estate, Adam Smith wrote about political leadership in a time of “turbulence and “disorder.” It is a brief passage and one quite applicable to Americans in the early twenty-first century. Smith tells us in the mid-eighteenth century there are two types of political leaders in any society: one is a person of the “system” while the other is a person of the “public spirit.” The man of the “system”:
holds out some plausible plan of [social] reformation which, [he] pretends, will not only remove the inconveniences and relieve the distresses immediately complained of, but will prevent, in all time coming, any return of the like inconveniences and distresses. . . . The system man is intoxicated with the imaginary beauty of this ideal system, of which they have no experience, but which has been represented to them in all the most dazzling colors in which the eloquence of their leaders could paint it.
Contrarily, the man of the “public spirit”:
will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of his people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniences which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to.
These descriptions are not just the chronologically bound musings of an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher but observations that can be applicable to twenty-first–century American political society. Smith describes American “intoxicated idealistic” activists who want to “immediately” eradicate, eviscerate, and expunge anything that offends their sensibilities. We live in an age “drunk” with political power.
David Hume was a “public spirit” man through and through, and wrote reflectively, systematically, and widely to this end. He left a body of substantial work that effectively combats the age of dictatorial rationalism from a secular vantage point. Hume’s writings provided political guidance, social security, and economic direction for America’s Founding Fathers as they created a constitution (with all its flaws) for a new and more just Republic. Hume’s ideas, which were so influential to the colonials can still provide guardrails for contemporary American political discourse. David Hume’s influence in the shaping of American political society from its very beginning codification will be shown and his benefit for contemporary American society to preserve our union will become evident.
In eighteenth-century America, Hume’s seminal works were read by college students and young leaders throughout the colonies. The colonials wrote in Humean phraseology, presumably to those who also understood Hume’s thought. Hume’s notions of experience and skepticism, the uniformity of human nature, commerce, culture, factions, interests, customs, social institutions, and most importantly, the “science of politics,” were avidly studied, absorbed, and promulgated by the leading colonial minds. As Jeffry Morrison put it, “the ideas and language of Hume were in the colonial air.”
Hume’s political writings fit the pragmatic temper of the new Americans. From every state at the Constitutional Convention his ideas found purchase in the delegates’ debates, letters, and essays. What the Founding Fathers found attractive in Hume was his Scottish common sense, and his freedom from political and religious mysticism and convictions. Hume’s powerful practical intellect grounded in experience resulted in political compromise, the art of the experience. It is no paradox that Americans have always continued to have faith in their religion but skepticism in their politics. That is, we Americans expect our religion to be metaphysical, but we expect our politicians to be very physical. Thus, there is a sense in which Hume’s religious “mitigated skepticism” has its political application in the American civil experience.
As diesel fuel prices rise across the country, the Department of Homeland Security is fielding requests for Jones Act waivers. While the government should approve these waivers, it seems likely that it will pursue a more permanent solution — to repeal the law altogether.
Otherwise known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that any cargo carried between domestic ports must be transported on American-manufactured ships flying the American flag and manned by a mostly American crew. Initially aimed at protecting the U.S. shipping industry from foreign competition, the act artificially limits the supply of cargo ships, making it more costly to transport refined diesel fuel across the country. When energy shortages arise, governors often apply for waivers to get fuel delivered to their states from domestic refineries without having to wait for American ships to become available. Such waivers would not be necessary if the law were permanently revoked. Thankfully, there are strong indications that the Jones Act is facing a final repeal.
Although the law is not without its die-hard defenders:
Jones Act lobbyists have knives out to defend their pet policy. In 2020, the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee, an organization that includes cargo ship owners and builders, sent an email to a government agency recommending that “all past and present members of the Cato and Mercatus Institutes” be charged with treason. Their crime? Advocating the repeal of the Jones Act. Such extreme defensive measures show how vulnerable Jones Act supporters feel — clearly, proponents of the act sense that the political tide is turning against them.
It’s about time, too. The only reason it has lasted this long is that the benefits of the Jones Act are highly concentrated within small groups such as ship owners, ship manufacturers, crew members, and the unions that represent them. These groups have a huge incentive to lobby the government to keep it. And because they work closely with each other, they’re also easy to organize into groups such as the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee. Meanwhile, the marginal cost to everyone else has been negligible enough that it hasn’t been worth the time and effort it would take to lobby against the act — until now.
Pence doesn’t say. Instead, he focuses on the challenges to the electoral vote count in Congress, which he would preside over on Jan. 6. Pence writes that he “welcomed” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., co-sponsoring objections from House Republicans “because it meant we would have a substantive debate,” adding, “Without a senator’s support, I would have been required to dismiss House objections without debate, something I didn’t want to do.”
You see, Pence tries to have his cake and eat it, too. He says he supported “debate” around the “concerns” about the election — but doesn’t actually address the substance of those concerns or the purpose of the debate. Hawley may have avoided endorsing any of the conspiracies Trump was spreading directly, but he also had to know that Trump was the source of the vast majority of the concerns in question. It was all an exercise in self-promotion, not an attempt to clarify the record, and Pence should know that.
This is gonna leave a mark:
. . . let’s not even touch on the conversation with Trump that Pence recounts at the end of the op-ed, except to say that I haven’t read an epilogue that self-indulgent since the seventh “Harry Potter” book.
Ian Bogost's piece at The Atlanticentitled "We're Witnessing the End of Social Media" is garnering a lot of buzz right now, and it is worthy of discussion. He applauds the recent misfortunes of Twitter and Facebook, saying that they have mutated the way human beings are designed to interact and form communities:
t’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.
The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.
A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.
But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.
At the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sibarium alerts us to a particularly insidious bank-loan concept: looking at how borrowers measure up in terms of diversity practices when deciding whether to lend them money:
Amid an uptick in race-conscious hiring programs throughout corporate America, many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, tying the cost of borrowing to the companies’ workforce diversity, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Over the past two years, each of those companies has secured a lending agreement, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.
Under the terms of BlackRock’s $4.4 billion credit facility, for example, Wells Fargo will lower the firm’s interest rate by 0.05 percent if it hits two benchmarks—a 30 percent increase in the share of black and Hispanic employees by 2024, and a 3 percent increase in the share of female executives each year—or hike the rate by the same amount if it misses both.
The agreements, which typically involve multiple banks, are effectively credit cards for businesses: Rather than make a onetime loan, lenders extend a continuous line of credit that companies can dip into at will, either to cover operating costs or as a rainy day fund for emergencies. That means changes in a facility’s interest rate—even modest ones like BlackRock’s 0.05 percent diversity adjustment—can have an appreciable effect on a business’s bottom line.
Companies have advertised these agreements as proof of their progressive bona fides. Trimble CEO Rob Painter, for example, said the company’s credit facility—which conditions interest rates on the percentage of female employees—illustrates Trimble’s "commitment" to "gender diversity in the workplace." In press releases announcing their own credit facilities, executives at BlackRock, Prudential, and Definity say the agreements demonstrate their commitment to "accountability."
But critics see something far more sinister: a form of blatant discrimination that will harm consumers, credit markets, and the rule of law.
"If a bank penalized a company's credit rating because it had too many women or was too racially diverse, we would be appalled," said one senior government regulator, who managed a nine-figure credit facility as a lawyer in private practice. "This is the exact same thing, except the penalized target is white men."
Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does “equity” refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policiesfrom mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.
The older I get, the more reluctant I am to lend any writer or thinker with whom I'm currently resonating my full enthusiasm. I've been burned too many times. But Andrew T. Walker, who teaches Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is currently addressing things that need broader discussion. In his latest piece for World, entitled "Why Is America Coming Apart?", he takes dead aim at what is really going on:
What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. Drag Queens dancing in front of children is as recreational as baseball in some parts of the country, or so it seems. Mainstream medical guilds now suggest that confused children and teens mutilate their bodies to tranquilize the mind. Public schools when I grew up might have been secular, but they weren’t morally insane or propagandizing students in cultural self-hatred like I routinely hear about now. Major media outlets are entirely compromised by a groveling deference to wokism and identity politics. The left once called for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare,” but the move to de-stigmatize abortion and gloat about it has moved the needle in a ghoulish direction.
The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. At least for the moment, put away questions about Christian Nationalism. What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. Because that would mean restoring virtues that figures like former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy believe are incompatible with liberty. Such virtues can only be grounded in a transcendent account of the universe.
At Medium, Drew Shepherd looks at how a Christian might address the charge of hypocrisy:
. . . if we stick to the notion that Christianity should be dismissed because its followers act contrarily to their claims, we must first go to the source to see what those claims actually are.
Because if you’re looking for biblical evidence that says Christians never do wrong, you’re out of luck:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. (Rom. 7:18–21 NIV)
These verses describe the apostle Paul’s struggle with sin in his life. And if the man who wrote a large chunk of the New Testament admitted he was a “hypocrite”, it’s no surprise that other Christians face the same problem.
Ecclesiastes also presented this truth in the Old Testament:
Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins. (Eccles. 7:20 NASB)
And the apostle John followed with the same idea:
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8 NIV)
No matter how clean some Christians appear or how outspoken they are, they will always contend with a form of evil in their life.
So since this problem is common among all Christians — even the ones who should know better — you’d think God would be angry at us all the time. At least that’s how most people think of God: as a harsh, unforgiving, ban-you-to-hell-because-of-what-you-did-in-second-grade Person. But these next verses from the book of Psalms paint a different picture:
Just as a father has compassion on his children, So the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust. (Psalm 103:13–14 NASB)
God knows everything about our fragile makeup and the condition of our nature — He has compassion on us because of it.
He knows the Christian life involves doing the unnatural. And He knows we would never succeed without His help.
And my latest at Precipice is about how it's time for me to realize I'm no longer a fledgling Christian and that I can and need to engage the world with the assurance of someone whose been at this faith-walk thing a while.
There. That ought to keep you out of mischief this weekend.
It has its valid points. Corporate woke-ism is a real thing. The nation's largest companies are indeed ate up with preoccupation with "equity," inclusiveness and the global climate.
Where his piece unravels is when he conflates concern about that with the kind of nostalgic yearning for the thriving factory towns of a bygone era that was a key component of Trumpism, trotting out the protectionist lines about "moving good jobs out of our nation," "prioritizing offshoring" and "with the profits came a corporate duty to care for the strength of the nation and its citizens." Where in the federal code is that found? Those were the whines of the populists well before the woke-ism element became such a problem.
I understand that US companies being so entwined with China is problematic and even has national security implications, but that's a specific situation that ought to be targeted for examination. The idea that it's, generally speaking, somehow "greedy" for corporations to offshore is something that has a more-than-faint leftist odor about it. Government - as in elected lawmakers such as Rubio - ought to be steering policy toward a free-market footing. Whether Republicans have ever been anywhere close to purists about that is debatable, but given that their party is ostensibly the repository for conservative principles on the national landscape, they should be.
Rubio frames the low-corporate-taxes stance Republicans have taken as part of a transaction:
Cutting corporate taxes, and especially investment taxes, makes sense if US companies are going to invest in American industry. But if they’re instead prioritizing offshoring operations or simply returning windfalls to shareholders, then policymakers are going to start being more careful in how we structure tax cuts.
Sorry, Senator, the reason for keeping corporate taxes low is the same as it is for any kind of taxes: the money belongs to the person or organization earning it, not the government.
He winds up his argument with this humdinger. There's no way around it; it sounds downright Mussolini-esque:
America’s laws should keep our nation’s corporations firmly ordered to our national common good.
Corporations, like mom-and-pop shops or any other form of organization that exists to show its owners a return on their investment, are not obligated to hew to anybody's concept of the "national common good." Who the hell gets to define that?
Yes, corporations ought to get out of the business of weighing in on transgender bathrooms, election laws and police shootings, but they ought to continue to set up their facilities and supply chains in the most cost-efficient manner possible, free of pressure from government to do otherwise.
Senator Rubio, when did you get this idea that tax law is a legitimate instrument of leverage?
I'll be excerpting at length, because this is supremely important to share far and wide.
What Trump was trying to do was sell a return to some mythical golden age that, to the extent it really existed, cannot be replicated:
Donald Trump was America’s first post-Depression presidential nominee to make protectionism a major plank of his platform. During the 2016 campaign he presented it, along with tax cuts and deregulation, as an antidote to President Obama’s weak economic recovery—the weakest of the postwar period. In his first two years as president, Mr. Trump lifted regulatory burdens and pushed through a major tax cut, which triggered a broad-based rise in income and employment. He then turned to his protectionist agenda, which reduced economic growth and failed to deliver Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin in the 2020 election. Protectionism failed both as economic policy and political strategy.
Much of the allure of U.S. postwar protectionism comes from nostalgia for an enduring myth: the “golden age of American manufacturing.” There was a manufacturing bonanza in the 1950s and ’60s, but it wasn’t engineered by policy makers then and couldn’t be replicated now. It was an unsustainable anomaly created by World War II.
The U.S. emerged from the war with an almost totally new industrial base, a carry-over from a wartime role as “the great arsenal of democracy.” With much of the rest of the developed world in rubble, America enjoyed a virtual monopoly in heavy manufacturing for a quarter-century. In the 1950s, real average hourly earnings in manufacturing leapt 34.5%—seven times their growth in the 1970s.
By the mid-1970s, Europe and Japan had risen from the ashes of the war and South Korea and Taiwan had industrialized. By 1976, U.S. manufacturing exports had returned to prewar levels, as a percentage of global exports, and after 1979 U.S. manufacturing employment fell in absolute terms as a push was undertaken to automate, reduce labor costs and regain competitiveness. While manufacturing jobs declined from 32% of total employment in 1953 to 8.7% in 2015, manufacturing as a share of real gross domestic product has remained virtually constant due to increases in productivity.
The job increases resultant from Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum associated with their production were negated by losses in industries further down the supply chain. The reason is simple: those industries were paying higher prices for raw material.
There was further fallout:
The uncertainty concerning which industry would be hurt next caused private investment to decline across the economy. GDP growth, which had been accelerating in 2017 and 2018, fell 20% in 2019, from 2.9% to 2.3%, in line with the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the negative effect of the protectionist policies.
Protectionism even hurt manufacturing in the states it was supposed to help. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had increased in 2017 and 2018, started to fall in 2019 as the trade war intensified.
Populist/nationalist types speak disparagingly of "globalism," but the fact is that supply chains in the twenty-first century are irreversibly international, and that's a good thing. It's the free market playing itself out. Economic actors are playing to their strengths, each one doing what it does best, resulting in a whole that is high-quality and conducive to further advancement.
What got Trump his blue-collar votes in 2016 was a vague appeal to hope rather than confidence in specific results:
If Mr. Trump’s trade message helped him in the 2016 election, it was because he was expressing concern about the plight of working people who had suffered disproportionately during the Obama “secular stagnation,” not because protectionism itself was popular. Even among Trump supporters, a post-2020 election poll by YouGov showed that 60% believed foreign trade helps the economy. The voting pattern of Lordstown, Ohio—where Mr. Trump promised in 2017 to save local factory jobs—suggests that it was the concern Mr. Trump expressed, not his ability to save the General Motors plant, that attracted their votes in the first place. The plant closed anyway, and the area voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 by an even bigger margin than in 2016.
Ironically, Biden seems to want to continue this approach, as evidenced by his use of the term "made in America."
The broad lesson to be gleaned from this is that, once again, we see that politicians telling voters that government can do things to make their lives better is nothing but snake oil. As free human beings, creatures imbued with agency, we are largely responsible for our destinies.
The task before those who understand this is to convince the public at large that they shouldn't want it any other way. That's a tall order. The opposite mindset is pretty entrenched.
You know how Trumpists would - and still do, at least among the bitter-enders - at some point in a discussion of the VSG's fitness/unfitness for office toss out a list of what they were utterly certain were his great achievements as president?
After about three or four that they know a conservative would agree on - judicial appointments, deregulation, embassy to Jerusalem - the list would start to get pretty shaky. One item that would always show up is "stood up to China."
Driving the news: China isn't even close to fulfilling its end of the deal — having come up 42% short of its commitment, Chad Bown, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, reported late last week.
The phase one deal was meant to be the Trump administration's reward for U.S. farmers, manufacturers and other business owners who had been bludgeoned by Trump's tax on American businesses via the trade war's tariffs.
What was supposed to happen: The trade war was billed as a plan to bring China to its knees by choking off the all-important American market with 25% tariffs on many imports that would rein in the U.S. trade deficit, boost American exports and slow China's rise as a global superpower.
What really happened: "The trade war with China hurt the US economy and failed to achieve major policy goals," a recent study commissioned by the U.S.-China Business Council argues, finding that the trade war reduced economic growth and cost the U.S. 245,000 jobs.
Last year, the U.S. trade deficit widened to its largest on record. In the fourth quarter, the U.S. goods trade deficit hit its highest share of GDP since 2012 and the U.S. current account deficit jumped to its highest level in more than 12 years in the third quarter.
Foreign direct investment to the U.S. fell 49% in 2020 — outpacing the overall global decrease of 42%.
These trends had all been moving in this direction since 2017, and were accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic as Trump refused to remove tariffs despite their strain on businesses.
The big picture: "The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S. workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies," analysts at Brookings noted in August.
This is yet another example of how Trumpists' characterization of their object of worship and the movement to which they belong is in no way conservative.
Not all conservatives are purists about advocating free-market economics, but most see it as at least a lodestar, even if adjustments must be made in an imperfect world. But rank protectionism is not part of any conservative's economic policy. It's a distortion of the free market with the purpose of having some vague notion of "putting America first."
No, we can see that it is among Trump's greatest bungles. The guy had no idea what he was doing. Same goes for Peter Navarro and Wilber Ross.
Canada said Friday it will slap retaliatory tariffs on $2.7 billion worth of U.S. goods, the latest development in a new trade feud sparked by President Donald Trump’s decision to reimpose aluminum duties on the U.S. ally.
“Canada will respond swiftly and strongly,” Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at a news conference.
“We will impose dollar-for-dollar countermeasures in a balanced and perfectly reciprocal retaliation,” she said. “We will not escalate and we will not back down.”
Freeland said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will spend the next 30 days consulting with Canadian citizens and businesses on a broad list of aluminum-containing products. Canada’s new duties on U.S. imports, she said, will total 3.6 billion Canadian dollars ($2.7 billion).
“The aluminum business was being decimated by Canada,” he said.
Trudeau vowed to enact countermeasures against the U.S. just hours after Trump’s announcement.
Freeland is clearly not amused:
Freeland on Friday . . . argu[ed] that the tariffs will hurt American consumers already suffering from the economic devastation inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.
“In imposing these tariffs, the United States has taken the absurd decision to harm its own people at a time when its economy is suffering the deepest crisis since the Great Depression,” Freeland said.
“These tariffs are unnecessary, unwarranted and entirely unacceptable,” she added. “They should not be imposed. Let me be clear: Canadian aluminum is in no way a threat to U.S. national security, which remains the ostensible reason for these tariffs, and that is a ludicrous notion.”
Freeland also noted that the new tariffs come just over a month after the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – the Trump-backed trade pact that replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA – went into effect.
“Now is the time to advance North American economic competitiveness, not to hinder it,” she said.
"Team player" is an utterly foreign concept to the VSG.
On our Barney & Clyde podcast, Clyde Myers and I frequently do a segment we call "Maybe Someday We'll Try A Free Market." We like the slightly wistful tone of the title, and the hint of cynicism, the suggestion that it's a when-donkeys-fly grade of speculation.
Which is not to say that hope is entirely extinguished in our liberty-cherishing hearts. We press on with making the case for it, even in times like these, when, as Kevin Williamson points out, the only viable alternatives for post-Americans to choose from regarding federal policy are erratic protectionism and leftist protectionism:
A promise of economic nationalism, an expensive infrastructure bill that’s really a make-work program, prejudice against foreigners, denunciations of Wall Street — Joe Biden is running the 2016 Trump campaign against Donald Trump in 2020.
Joe Biden gave a big economic speech in Pennsylvania yesterday, and his economic agenda has three parts: 1) a $400 billion federal spending spree with some additional “Buy American” rules attached to it; 2) a somewhat more modest ($300 billion) raft of subsidies for politically connected industries (electric vehicles, telecoms) that we are going to pretend is a research-and-development program; 3) a very large tax increase (by some estimates, the largest proposed in modern times) to pay for No. 1 and No. 2. You will recognize this as approximately the same bulls—t that Donald Trump was peddling in 2016 and Barack Obama was peddling in 2008 and 2012. It is the same crap that has at various times been peddled by figures such as George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan, and by relatively minor figures such as Ted Strickland. It is nonsense, but it never goes out of fashion.
It would be interesting to know what kinds of discussions among Biden's advisors led to putting such throbbing insularity forward at this time. Maybe they concluded that glitches in mask and ventilator availability at the onset of the pandemic had post-America sufficiently spooked to be clamoring for supply chains to be pulled within the confines of our continental shores.
In any event, there's now going to be a period of each campaign going to great lengths to distinguish its flavor of protectionism from the other. And there are distinctions. The Trump flavor focuses on tariffs and upending existing trade agreements. The Biden flavor focuses on taxes and subsidies.
Still, they have in common the assumption that human ingenuity could never improve human lives as well as government.
Joseph Schumpeter, call your office.
The economic life of our species is distinct from the governments we have gathered ourselves under. Organizations engaged in making and selling products - by which I pretty much mean those structured as corporations - have needs for particular materials, processes and people that change over time and at any given moment are most profitably employed under certain circumstances. That's how consumers enjoy an array of choices they can make based on the nexus of price, quality and situational benefit that suits each of them as individuals.
The salient point here is that the supply end of the equation takes its cue from what the demand end says that it wants. Billions of sovereign individuals send signals to those who have chosen a life of making and selling things by means of what they do and do not choose to spend their money on.
Industrial policy - which is what Trump, Biden and all the others Williamson mentions are actually calling for - deprives those billions of sovereign individuals of their choice of what signals to send. The decision about what will be made and sold is made in a top-down fashion.
It's couched in the rhetoric of compassion and patriotism. Advocates of industrial policy know that they can stir hearts by appeals to the idea that a product being made in America - from extraction of the basic materials to intermediate refining thereof to crafting of the finished thing - is inherently noble, because it puts Americans to work and fosters pride in some kind of intrinsically American craftsmanship.
But it really makes a sport out of what should be just basic human interaction. It makes teams out of nations, and deprives individual buyers of goods and services who are looking for enhancements of their lives in the maximum value that a good or service ought to have.
Alas, in an emotionally whipped-up time such as ours, this is not an easy sell. People readily lend an ear to arguments that they are somehow being shafted by some vaguely defined other and that they need a champion - in the form of government - to right such a wrong.
In such a climate, about all I'd venture to implore my fellow citizens to do is not get preoccupied in the minutiae of the supposedly important differences between Trump-style protectionism and Biden's brand. It's a shiny object that will do nothing to make you more free.
One of the few themes of the VSG's candidacy and subsequent presidency that has had any coherence was this business about putting America first and bringing back manufacturing jobs.
The new North American free trade agreement that came into effect on July 1 was touted by US president Donald Trump as an engine of American job creation. But Japan’s automakers are largely opting instead to keep their Mexican operations in place and pay their workers more or even just pay tariffs.
The US-Mexico-Canada agreement requires 40 per cent or more of parts for each passenger vehicle to be manufactured by workers who are paid at least $16 an hour as a condition to make them tariff-free in the region. Mr Trump hailed that feature as a way to boost production in the US, which has a higher hourly rate than Mexico.
However, this looks to be wishful thinking. The ratio of US-Canada parts among Mexican-assembled vehicles sold in the US was 13.5 per cent in 2018, according to the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr Trump’s theory was that US production would inevitably increase to meet the 40 per cent requirement, but Japanese automakers — which had already positioned their production bases according to the old Nafta regime — are not willing to up sticks and redeploy.
One reason is the cost of moving production. Honda-affiliated parts maker Keihin will raise the hourly wage of employees at a factory in Mexico to $16 by next month — triple the average rate of a parts factory in Mexico but still cheaper than making a move. Because the pandemic has hurt earnings, the cost of moving production will probably be too burdensome over the foreseeable future. Auto component maker Piolax will raise the hourly wage at its Mexican plant to $16 within the year, and is also installing robots to mitigate rising labour costs, said Yukihiko Shimazu, company president.
Toyota, which built a new plant in Mexico in 2015, is not finding it easy to change plans either. The new plant started full-scale production of pick-up trucks in February. The trucks are popular in the US and will be subject to a 25 per cent tariff if they do not meet the content requirements of the USMCA. But if Toyota does not operate the factory, it cannot recover its investment.
“We don’t want to be whipped around by a policy that we don’t know how long it will last,” said an executive at a Japanese carmaker.
At some point last week, I saw a question posed somewhere - it might have been Twitter, or in some short opinion-site piece - that began with the observation that we'd been seeing "good Trump" for a little while. The question was whether that could be maintained during the NATO 70th anniversary gathering in London.
It's clear that we now have our answer. After indulging himself in lengthy pressers (52 minutes, 39 and 30) after meeting with some of the leaders present, at least one (the one with French president Emmanuel Macron) of which was acrimonious, he abruptly cancelled what was to be the official end-of-summit press conference and flew home.
Macron tried to parry the flow of words, making clear that he disagreed with Trump on Turkey's intervention in Syria.
When Trump tried to joke about France taking back its citizens captured in the region — “Would you like some nice ISIS fighters? I can give them to you” — Macron responded.
“Let’s be serious,” he snapped back. “The very large number of fighters you have on the ground are ISIS fighters coming from Syria, from Iraq, and the region.”
“This is why he’s a great politician, because that was one of the greatest nonanswers I’ve ever heard,” Trump said, to Macron’s clear irritation.
There were several other blurting of note at that get-together, responses to media questions rather than barbs directed at Macron.
He would not commit to coming to any NATO member's defense if the nation was attacked, saying that in the case of countries paying less than the agreed-upon 2 percent of their defense budgets, saying, in his signature word-salad style, "Why is it they owe us for this year, but every time a new year comes along, they don't have to pay?" Um, they don't pay "us," they pay NATO, an organization that all the nations in question belong to.
The Very Stable Genius said of Chinese president Xi, "I don't think he likes me so much anymore, but that's okay." Probably the best face to put on the relationship given that the big trade deal the VSG has been saying was right around the corner is in fact still mired in sticking points, a development that cause the stock market to slide 250 points in real time.
About the Kurds in Northern Syria, he said, "We have taken the oil. I have taken the oil. We should have done it in other locations, frankly, where we were. I can name four of them right now, but we've taken the oil."
What caused his take-his-toys-and-go-home pout was an informal cocktail-party gathering of heads of state at which there was a chuckle had over the VSG's disregard for niceties like promptness:
The video, which quickly went viral online, showed Trudeau, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and others speaking at a Buckingham Palace reception. The video begins with Johnson looking toward Macron and asking, "Is that why you were late?"
Trudeau jumped in, "He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top."
After a cut in the footage, Trudeau adds, "I watched his team's jaws drop on the floor."
President Donald Trump announced Monday that the US will "restore" steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina, citing a "massive devaluation of their currencies."
"Brazil and Argentina have been presiding over a massive devaluation of their currencies. which is not good for our farmers. Therefore, effective immediately, I will restore the Tariffs on all Steel & Aluminum that is shipped into the U.S. from those countries," Trump tweeted early Monday morning from Washington. He also called on the Federal Reserve to "act so that countries, of which there are many, no longer take advantage of our strong dollar by further devaluing their currencies."
Formal notices of the tariffs were not immediately announced by the Treasury or Commerce Departments or the Office of the US Trade Representative. Both Brazil and Argentina were exempted from 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs last year when Trump was attempting to avoid a trade war with those countries.
Brazil's President, Jair Bolsonaro, said Monday that he has an "open channel" of communication with Trump, according to state news agency Agencia Brasil.
Bolsonaro said he would meet with Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes Monday to discuss the issue and make a call to Trump if needed.
Argentina's Production and Labor Minister called Trump's decision to impose the tariffs "unexpected."
"There was no sign given to our government, to the Brazilian government or to the public sector that there would be a change in the deal with the United States," Dante Sica told state-run news agency Telam on Monday.
Sica said he met with Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie after seeing the tweet in order to "analyze the course of action" and told Telam that he had contacted the US Embassy in Argentina, as well "all contacts in Washington DC" to get more clarity on the situation.
The President's decision amounts to retaliation against two countries that have served as alternative suppliers of soybeans and other farm products to China, grabbing market share away from American farmers, a key constituency the President will need to win reelection in 2020.
Just great.
Two points among those that comprise a generally agreed-upon understanding of basic conservatism are an understanding of the supreme importance of US leadership for maintaining the world-order framework established at the end of World War II, and a fealty to free-market economics. This guy is obliterating both.
