Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2018

“So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill on the funeral of “maverick” Republican senator John McCain:

So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment. It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era.

The response to McCain’s death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. ‘John McCain’s funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet’, said a headline in the New Yorker, alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is ‘the resistance’ now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations, the Washington establishment.

The New Yorker piece, like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the anti-Trump theme of McCain’s funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn’t attend his funeral. And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a liberal commentariat that now views everything through the binary moral framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed, occasionally fascistic) and anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against Nazism). Even better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain’s daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam Trumpism, without explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what came before Trumpism, which of course was their rule, their politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media set might seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker writer, but it is also ‘more united’ in one important sense – ‘in its hatred of Donald Trump’.

[…]

The religious allusions, the talk of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain’s life so that it becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some of the madder McCain commentary, says there is now a ‘condition’ that he calls ‘Resistance Brain’, where people display an ‘urge to grab and cling on to anything that seems, even a little bit, like it might be the thing that Finally Defeats Donald Trump’. Even if the thing they’re grabbing on to is actually a bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of Anti-Trumpism has been extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge of liberal activists a decade ago, yet now its architects are praised because they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being against Trump washes away all sins.

August 12, 2018

Misunderstanding what the trade deficit represents

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In a post from last week, Tim Worstall explains why Donald Trump is wrong about the economic impact of a trade deficit:

I should note here that I didn’t, because as a foreigner I can’t, support The Donald at the last election. But I didn’t support Hillary even more. So this is more about really, actually, insisting that Trump is wrong on trade issues rather than just the more general he’s wrong about everything common in the US press.

[…]

What Trump, DiMicco and Navarro are getting wrong is this, the GDP equation.

Y = C+I+G+(X-M)

GDP is consumption plus investment plus government spending plus the trade balance – and minus it if there’s a trade deficit. So people look at this and think yep, if there’s a trade deficit than that makes Y, GDP, smaller!

But this is a mistake, an error. For, as the textbook immediately goes on to explain, what is it that we do with imports? Well, we either consume them, use them in investments or government buys them. So all imports are already in C and I and G. Meaning that if we don’t deduct them we’ll be double counting them. So, to avoid double counting we subtract them.

Trump and his advisers are simply wrong on this. The trade deficit doesn’t reduce the size of the economy. They’re getting it wrong simply because they’re not reading the second page of the explanation of the GDP equation.

July 27, 2018

“Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Robert Higgs on what he describes its supporters as “waging the trade war to end all trade wars”:

… even as Trump spouts venerable fallacies to justify and seek support for his destructive trade policies and related ad hoc actions, he and his supporters have sometimes offered a strange defense of their tactics: they purport to be seeking, at the end of the game, universal free trade, a world in which all countries have abandoned tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and other government intrusions in international exchange. In Wilsonian terms, they claim to be waging the trade war to end all trade wars. The idea is that by raising U.S. tariffs, they will induce other governments to lower and ultimately eliminate their own.

Of course, this rationale may be nothing more than wily claptrap, tossed out as a rhetorical bone to Republicans who favor freer trade. The administration’s actions to date certainly give no indication that it is aiming at global free trade. On the contrary. So the Wilsonian gambit may consist of nothing but hot air.

But if Trump and his trade advisers actually take this tactic seriously, they are deluding themselves.

First, and surely obviously, U.S. tariff increases will not induce other governments to lower their own, but to raise them, as the EU, China, Mexico, Canada, and other trading partners have already demonstrated. That’s why it’s called a trade war — because the “enemy” shoots back. History has shown repeatedly, most notably in the early 1930s, in the wake of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, that such trade wars only spiral downward, choking off more and more trade, despoiling the international division of labor in accordance with comparative advantage, and thereby diminishing real income in all the trading countries.

Second, the prospect of the U.S. government’s ever abandoning tariffs is slim to none. Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. This character makes them attract great support from protected special interests and little opposition from the general public — including other producers — when they are enacted or extended. They are easy for politicians to put in place and diabolically difficult for anyone to eliminate. Although the costs are great — much greater than the benefits for the economy as a whole — hardly anyone’s costs are great enough to justify mounting a potent political attack on the tariffs.

People who get tariffs put in place to protect them in the first place are well positioned to marshal strong opposition to any political attempt to eliminate these taxes on consumers who buy from competing, foreign suppliers. Consumers rarely know anything about why foreign goods are priced as they are, and producers, in general, are usually not affected enough by tariffs on imported raw materials and components to justify well-funded politicking against them.

July 26, 2018

The Trump tariffs are working exactly as designed

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

That is, they’re becoming a drag on the economy and will take away a lot of the economic activity that was stimulated by the tax cuts enacted earlier. Warren Meyer says that it’s time that congress reclaimed the tariff powers it has outsourced to the executive branch over the years:

I Know Congress Hates To Challenge A President of Its Own Party, But…

…Congress simply has to pare back the tariff authority it has delegated the President. It is simply insane that Trump can just unilaterally impose 20% tariffs on foreign automobiles, a $200 billion new tax on US consumers.

It is appalling to see Trump following the usual blue model of economic regulation, imposing one intervention after another, each meant to fix the unintended consequences of the last intervention. Steel tariffs increased costs to domestic auto makers, so Trump proposes tariffs on foreign autos. When tariffs result (inevitably) in counter-tariffs on US agricultural exports, Trump proposes more agricultural subsidies. People (not me) lament gridlock in government and want more fluid lawmaking — well here it is. And it sucks. It is mindless and reactive and emotional and totally ignorant of economics.

These tariffs, when combined with earlier actions, will result in tax increases on consumers that swamp the tax cuts Trump and the Republicans were so proud of last year.

Jon Gabriel on the most recent “fix” for one of those unintended consequences:

A few months back, President Trump declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Now, just as nearly every economist on the left and right predicted, Americans are being hurt.

The White House slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. China retaliated with planned tariffs on soybeans, meats and various agricultural products. Mexico, Canada and the European Union also struck back at farm goods and other U.S. exports.

A smart leader would notice his mistake and end the destructive policy. Instead, Trump declared that “tariffs are the greatest” and created a multibillion-dollar federal program to mitigate a small part of the mess he created.

Since Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue estimated $11 billion in damage to the industry, he announced a $12 billion payoff to make up the difference.

The administration used emergency executive powers created during the Great Depression; that way Congress wouldn’t get to weigh in.

“This is obviously a short-term solution that will give President Trump time to work on a long-term trade policy and deal to benefit agriculture as well as all sectors of the American economy,” Perdue told reporters.

It’s certainly short-term, but hardly a solution. Trade deals and networks are disrupted, farmers can’t plan for the future, and non-agricultural industries are still losing money. Not to mention all the American consumers watching prices rise on all sorts of household goods.

But red states have a lot of farmers and the midterms are just three months away. Maybe borrowing a few billion dollars will hide enough economic pain to convince voters to keep Republicans in power for two more years.

July 22, 2018

Trump and Putin … with all this smoke, there has to be a smoking gun, right?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh pours cold water on the still-smouldering hopes of the “smoking gun” enthusiasts:

If the president can be found guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” that is another thing, but that would require courtroom-worthy evidence of action, as opposed to indications of presidential doctrine or feeling or even strong hints of compromised personal interest. Trump did behave in Helsinki like someone who is beholden to Russia, or who is anxious for a rapprochement with Putin’s state. Yet he was, and this could not have come as a surprise, quick to try reversing himself later — emphasizing how tough he has been with Russia and how tough he is prepared to continue to be. Grrr!

Since I’m not on a diet of television news, I tend to interpret this as Trumpian “leadership” technique. They are the actions of someone who is convinced that anything can be accomplished by means of erratic emotional style and business-literature verbal tactics. These include cheap personal praise for negotiating opponents, which has become a perfectly foreseeable theme of Trump as a diplomat. (The tactical corollary is that very popular or highly esteemed people are especially vulnerable to outbursts of surprise criticism, and that has been a feature of Trump, too.)

It does not really cost the United States anything for Trump to praise Putin as skilled and strong (as a tyrant, he has been effective at maintaining domestic moral legitimacy, even if judged by the cost in shed blood) or to portray Kim Jong Un as a young man coping with terrible responsibilities. (Trump’s distaste for NATO is more dangerous as rhetoric, but did the other member nations forget for a while that political legitimacy within the United States is a prerequisite for the organization’s existence? If in the long run we devote a little more attention to the necessary housekeeping, Trump may have done the world a service.)

[…] The midterm congressional elections will be held with a long-forgotten fact re-emerging in the American popular consciousness: that much of the president’s power to set foreign policy and foul up trade is actually the property of Congress, and could be reclaimed after a century of careless delegation.

Perhaps some Americans are beginning to consider that it does not matter most whether you are with the good guys in the Trump/anti-Trump drama. Which is not to say you do not want to be one of the good guys. But the opportunity for American millennials, considered as a generation on the cusp of electoral dominance, is not just to kick Trump out, but to renovate the presidency so that the republic can survive having an unsuitable or even compromised person as president. Everybody got that? Are we good? Eyes on the ball, people.

July 14, 2018

Trump’s tariffs are working

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall explains that the recent US price hikes in washing machines is exactly what the Trump administration wanted:

The part of import tariffs that all too many fail to understand is that it is consumers being “protected” by them who actually pay them. That is, import tariffs on foreign goods entering the United States are paid by those inside the United States. Or, as we can also put it, Trump’s tariffs are making Americans poorer. This isn’t a known to be desired effect of economic policy.

However, it’s important to note that the real burden doesn’t come from the rise in price of the imports. It’s what the domestic producers do to us all in the absence of that foreign competition which is important:

The clear and obvious effect of import tariffs – Credit, BLS, via Mark Perry and AEI, by permission

    If you’re unfortunate enough to be shopping for a new washing machine, you can thank the Trump tariffs on imported washing machines, washing machine parts, steel and aluminum for the largest three-month price increase — 16.4% from February to May this year — in the 40-year history of the BLS series for Major Appliances: Laundry Equipment that started in January 1978 (see chart above). In the May CPI report (see Table 2), the one-month increase in the CPI for Laundry Equipment of 7.4% in May followed a 9.6% increase in April, and in both months was the largest monthly price increase of any of the 300 individual CPI categories or sub-categories. For the month of May, the 7.4% increase in the washing machine series was twice the increase of the next highest increase of 3.7% for educational books and supplies (mostly college textbooks).

What’s worse than this price rise is that this is planned. This is the desired outcome from the people who imposed these taxes.

July 9, 2018

Nominating Amy Barrett “would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have no idea who President Trump will announce later today as his nominee for the vacancy on the US Supreme Court, but Conrad Black is plumping for one particular candidate:

The desperation of the Democrats to stop the apparently inexorable rise of a president they so completely discounted and despised, and assumed they could remove or emasculate just by turning up the volume and activity of their media organ monkeys, may drive them to accidental suicide over the latest Supreme Court vacancy. I have no standing at all to intuit whom the president may nominate. But if, as I suspect, it is Judge Amy Barrett, it would be a tactical masterpiece on the level of Napoleon’s conduct of the Battle of Austerlitz, or Hannibal at Cannae.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Barrett to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on October 31, by a 55-43 vote. Three Democrats voted for her and two did not vote. It would not be easy to justify changing their votes now, as she has served unexceptionably. At her confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee’s aged ranking Democrat, asked Barrett about her religious views, and the nominee responded that no judge should allow personal views, whether based on faith or anything else, to influence the imposition of the law. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern,” Feinstein said infamously. This was an outrageous comment; Feinstein doesn’t know anything about the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, and she has no idea what privately motivates Judge Barrett.

The fury and haste of the Democrats once the starting gun went off with the announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy from the Supreme Court, expressed their blind panic that their entire protracted regime of encroachments and embellishments on the Constitution — buttressing their centralized and authoritarian notion of administrative juridical governance with pretense to defending the rights of women, affirmative action, and the legislative role of the judiciary generally — was now under mortal assault.

[…]

I believe the president will nominate Barrett, that the Democrats will take definitive leave of their depleted senses, apostrophize the judge as a Trojan Horse of female submission, that she will clear her hearings with flying colors while the president’s formidable battery of social media and talk show supporters roast the Democrats for attacking an exemplary female achiever and a fine jurist whose only offense is to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest in the country with more than 70 million adherents. Remember, too, the Supreme Court in the final days of its term ruled that crisis pregnancy centers need not advertise the virtues of abortion with Planned Parenthood, and in 2016 said the Little Sisters of the Poor could not be compelled to pay for birth control and sterilization.

As at Cannae and at Austerlitz, the center of the defending force (Democrats), will crumble and President Trump will sweep the field. The Democratic playbook of endless ear-splitting allegations of serial outrages by the president, will not, finally, bring him down. On this issue, of mobilizing unfounded sexist paranoia against a flawless nominee, thereby insulting tens of millions of American women and U.S. Roman Catholics, before raising the objections of fair-minded non-Catholic men, at least another 20 percent of the population, the Democrats will immolate themselves in an unprecedentedly spectacular launch of their midterm election campaign.

Of course, no matter who is put forward, that person will immediately become the target of a supersized version of the “two-minute hate” that will literally last for months, or until the nominee is driven to decline the nomination, at which point the hate will be directed at the next nominee. Pedantically, however, Black’s use of Cannae and Austerlitz is only metaphorical: at Austerlitz, the allied centre did crumble, but at Cannae, it was the Roman cavalry on the flanks that crumbled, allowing the Carthaginians to envelop the rear of the main Roman army. Two very different battles.

July 5, 2018

The soon-to-be-announced target of the two-minute unceasing hate

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Reason, Jacob Sullum says Trump did well with his first Supreme Court pick, and the unwillingness of Trump’s opponents to acknowledge that shows how much blind partisanship has gripped the left:

Anthony M. Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch on Monday, April 10, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. Also shown, Gorsuch’s wife Louise stands on stage holding a family Bible. Justice Gorsuch is the Supreme Court’s 113th justice.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

“We have to STOP the next Trump nominee!” says a pop-up solicitation on People for the American Way’s website. Before you rush to “donate now,” you might want to consider the organization’s assessment of Trump’s last Supreme Court nominee.

“Far from being a fair-minded constitutionalist,” PFAW says, Neil Gorsuch “has proven to be a narrow-minded elitist who consistently votes in favor of corporations and the powerful.” The gap between that description and Gorsuch’s actual performance on the Court speaks volumes about the blind partisanship of Trump critics who care more about scoring political points than defending civil liberties.

PFAW is echoing the criticism of Democratic senators who worried, before Gorsuch was confirmed in April 2017, that he was not inclined to stand up for “the little guy.” Gorsuch’s record during a decade on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit belied that claim, and his 15 months on the Supreme Court provide further evidence that he is not shy about defending the principles that protect politically disfavored individuals from the whims of the powerful.

In sharp contrast with the man who nominated him, Gorsuch worries about abuses of the government’s power to take people’s property “for public use.” In June 2017, when the Court declined to hear a case that raised the question of whether a state can impose limits on the “just compensation” it owes for takings under the Fifth Amendment, Gorsuch, joined by Clarence Thomas, urged his colleagues to address that issue at the “next opportunity.”

That pairing was notable because Gorsuch is on record as admiring Thomas’s passionate dissent from the widely condemned 2005 decision in which the Court approved the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private owner to another in the name of economic development. Big businesses routinely use such arrangements to override the wishes of little people who get in the way of their plans.

July 4, 2018

It’s never a good idea to expand the power of the state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Francis Porretto on the problem of giving the state yet another tool for its already overflowing toolbox:

    The party in power is smug and arrogant. The party out of power is insane.” – Megan McArdle, a.k.a. “Jane Galt”

Among the older maxims of politics is to beware handing the State a new power without first reflecting on how your opponents could use it against you. For as sure as the Sun rises in the East, your opponents will return to dominance someday, and whatever powers you awarded the State will be in their hands.

Just now, the focus is on President Trump’s choice of a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats are tearing their collective hair out over this, as now that the filibuster is a dead letter for judicial appointees, their minority status in the Senate leaves them no way to block his selection. Yet it was Senate Democrats during the Obama Administration who first attacked the filibuster – when they were in the majority and sought to confirm Obama appointees. Coulda told ‘em then, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Today’s critical battles are over freedom of expression and “deplatforming.”

Some folks of sound mind and generally good will are exercised about how Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter regulate their immensely popular social-media platforms to disfavor conservatives. The complaints have been many, and a great many of them are both accurate (i.e., the things complained about really happened) and valid (i.e., only persons of conservative or libertarian bent were silenced). However, they come up against a barrier that’s proved impassable to date: the right of private property.

So a lot of those folks have embraced the notion that those platforms could be regulated by the federal government as public accommodations. That’s the conception under which the Civil Rights Acts were deemed to hold legitimate authority over restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and other nominally private properties. If you present your facility as “open to the public,” the logic runs, then you can be forbidden to discriminate – i.e., to provide your services to some members of the “public” but not others.

(For those who remember the “nationwide Bell System,” the phrase common carrier might rise to mind. The concept is essentially the same, as was the federal government’s assertion of authority over it. However, in that particular case, the rationale was that the Bell System was a monopoly, protected by that same federal government. Telecom deregulation and the breakup of the Bell System put paid to that scheme, thank God.)

Those in the Right who favor this notion are asking for trouble. Someday the balance of power will shift leftward once again. What would the Democrats – an increasingly totalitarian bunch who’ve never seen a law, a regulation, or a tax it didn’t love – do with the precedent that an Internet platform can be regulated as a public accommodation, despite being private property?

H/T to Bill St. Clair for the link.

June 23, 2018

“An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mike Godwin obliterates his own legacy:

An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is the idea that the longer an internet discussion thread drags on, the more likely it is that one of the discussants will mention Hitler. Rashly and inappropriately. They’ll compare their opponent to Der Fuhrer or say, ‘This is how Nazism started!!!!’. Reductio ad Hitlerum, as some call it. The law was invented by Professor Mike Godwin, an American attorney. And this week he scrapped it. To the delight of virtual leftists and Trump-bashers who are chomping at the bit to say ‘TRUMP IS LITERALLY A NAZI’, Godwin tweeted in relation to the Trump administration and its child-migrant policy: ‘By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.’

The response was one of glee. ‘Godwin has officially suspended Godwin’s Law’, tweeters crowed. The ‘actual, literal creator of Godwin’s Law’ has okayed Hitler comparisons, they whooped. They could now crack on with their hysterical likening of Trump to Hitler, and everything he does to what happened in 1930s Europe, without having to worry about someone shouting, ‘Godwin’s Law!’ at them. It so perfectly sums up the arrogance of the Twitterati and opinion-forming set: for years they mocked the Hitler-obsessed ‘below the line’ (BTL) commenters on their Tumblr blogs or Guardian columns, and even instituted an internet law to paint them as vulgar idiots, and now they themselves embrace mad Hitler blather and have scrapped the law that said such online talk was wrong. One online law for thee, another for me.

They can dress up their adoption of the Reductio ad Hitlerum worldview as a legitimate political position as much as they like. They can carry on saying, ‘Ah, but Trump’s policies really are like Hitler’s, which means my Nazi comparisons carry more weight than those of the non-Oxford-educated blowhard I had to block on Twitter because he kept saying “Hillary is Hitler”’. But they’re not fooling anyone. Except themselves. The rest of us know they are now just like the BTL people they once slagged off: confused, angry, rash and willing to exploit the greatest crime in history if it helps them to register and advertise their emotional fury with political developments. They are BTL people now, though they’re above the line, still all over the media, busily making it acceptable to talk shit about the Holocaust in public.

This week, with the controversy over Trump’s separation of families arriving illegally from Mexico, has represented a turning point in their popularisation of the Hitler comparisons they once chided. They refer to the places in which the children of illegal migrants are being housed as ‘concentration camps’. The former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted a photo of Auschwitz with the words, ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children’. Pre-empting the suspension of Godwin’s Law, a writer for the New Statesman said: ‘Stop talking about Godwin’s Law – real Nazis are back.’ Twitter buzzes with Trump-as-Hitler talk. ‘This is how the Holocaust started’, they all say.

I’m not a Trump fan … for the first few months of his administration (and during the election campaign), I labelled him as Il Donalduce, but I mostly meant that as a visual reference: watch any of Mussolini’s speeches and you’ll see some resonances with how Donald Trump speaks. The Hitler equivalence is wish-fulfilment by those who oppose him … it’s not an accurate or useful way to portray him, unless your goal is to make Adolf Hitler seem less demonic. I literally do not understand why anyone in pursuit of a modern political goal would try to make Hitler’s crimes seem more acceptable in an attempt to blacken the reputation of a living politician, unless you are clinically insane.

As a libertarian, Trump is far, far from my ideal of the “leader of the free world” (as the western media tends to portray the US president), but he’s not even close to the evil genius that created the “Thousand-year Reich“, and any attempt to portray him that way is historically illiterate and politically tone-deaf.

June 17, 2018

Conrad Black – Trump’s not bluffing

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post (but linked from his personal website), Conrad Black warns of the danger of assuming that Trump is just blustering on his trade threats:

Justin Trudeau struck just the right Canadian note of our gentle nature but refusal “to be pushed around,” and he predictably will reap the short-term reward for standing up for the country opposite the ideal American bogeyman, the blustering billionaire president who has been a Garry Trudeau caricature of the Ugly American for 25 years. (It is a very incomplete picture, like most caricatures, but it works for Trump and he often cultivates it.) The boycotts of American goods and holidays will be a bonus to Canada economically and the anti-Trump American media will be along within two weeks to lionize doughty Canada like “Gallant little Belgium” in 1914 and “Plucky Israel” in 1947, and it will strengthen Canada’s always fragile self-regard opposite the United States.

On the other hand, Trump isn’t just a blowhard; all his career he has known how to go for the jugular and his reference to 270-per-cent Canadian tariffs on butter is a valid complaint that threatens to tear the scab off this egregious payoff to the comparatively small number of Quebec dairy farmers who mainly profit from it. The same issue was hammered hard by Martha Hall Findlay when she ran for the federal Liberal leadership in 2013 and by Maxime Bernier when he ran narrowly behind Andrew Scheer for the Conservative federal leadership last year. The issue died down after their unsuccessful campaigns, but if Donald Trump is incited to hammer that theme, he will roil the domestic Canadian political waters and English-French relations in the country generally.

Presumably our trade negotiators will not become so intoxicated by the prime minister’s peppy talk and spontaneous popular boycotts of the U.S. that they forget the correlation of forces. An aroused American administration could do serious damage to Canada’s standard of living, and it could be a tempting tactic to expedite more important negotiations with Mexico and the principal Asian and European powers. The United States is now enjoying three times as great a rate of economic growth as Canada (4.8 to 1.5 per cent), has lower tax rates, 11 times as great an economy, and more unfilled jobs than unemployed people.

Behind the peeling façades of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, the United States is a monster, and not always an amiable monster. If Canadians are blinded by their visceral dislike of Donald Trump, as the antithesis of Canadian criteria for likeable public figures, they will be exposed to the ruthless pursuit of the national interest that in his own career propelled him from technical insolvency to immense wealth and celebrity and then, against all odds, to control of a great political party and to the headship of the most powerful country in the world. If these talks blow up, the U.S. doesn’t have to settle for WTO rules; it can impose outright protectionist measures. Justin Trudeau has been agile, and the country has responded admirably. But Canadian policy-makers must understand that they are playing for almost mortal stakes with potentially dangerous protagonists who have no sense of fair play and no interest in what Canada thinks of them.

June 13, 2018

Imagine … a tariff-free world

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Danny Chabino on what he calls “Trump’s G7 Surprise”:

In what I consider a brilliant move on the part of Trump and his team, instead of initially discussing what tariffs he would increase if x,y and z didn’t happen or if whichever nation wouldn’t reduce tariffs on whatever industry, he simply raised the simple question of why don’t we just not have tariffs at all? It’s brilliant in the sense that it not only shut down all the anticipated arguments, but also placed the world’s leaders in a position of having to awkwardly defend the very idea of tariffs (and subsidies), and they knew they couldn’t really do that. It highlighted the true intentions of the world’s leaders as representatives of the authoritarian nature of almost every existing government in the world today.

Now, please don’t misunderstand this article as me beaming with a Trump glow. In fact, Trump knew full well no one would take him up on such an offer. I do believe if they had he would have followed through, but his next moves will be ones that I believe are the wrong ones. He will seek to raise tariffs, which has always done more harm to the nation raising the tariffs than it has done good that nation. Trump will do just as he has threatened and hurt his own country;’s economy with new tariffs.

What I do enjoy, though, is that all of the world’s major leaders had to essentially admit that they don’t want their people and their economies to be better off. At least not on their own. They want their people and economies to be dependent upon their leadership and their governments. While everyone at the summit knew that the greatest of outcomes would be for all the world’s most powerful nations to exercise free trade, and that this would benefit the entire world in great proportions, that really wasn’t their aim. Their aim was to gain greater power. What an incredible admission!

When given a golden opportunity to end tariffs and increase freedom and prosperity for most citizens of the world, the world’s leaders instead chose to cling hard to their own designs. The world’s leaders know full well that tariffs hurt their own citizens, but they don’t care. Tariffs have never served the function of creating market efficiency, and they have never helped protect a nation’s economy. Instead, they have always been a means for governments to exercise control over huge parts of their own economies, and where there is control, there is power. Politicians and world leaders seek power. It’s like their drug of choice, and they can never get enough of it.

June 12, 2018

G7 minus one

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Justin Raimondo on the well-shared image of Angela Merkel and her associates apparently trying to browbeat Donald Trump at the G-7 meeting (this version from Raimondo’s article):

All the Very Serious People are tweeting and retweeting this “iconic” photo of Trump surrounded by the Euro-weenies, with Angela Merkel seeming to lecture the President while the rest of our faithless “allies” look on. It’s “America Alone” – the visual representation of the internationalist worldview: Trump’s policy of “America First” is “isolating” us, and, according to clueless leftists like Michael Moore, Merkel is now the “leader” of the “free world.”

This last is good news indeed, for if Merkel is the new leader of the “free world” then the stationing of 35,000 US troops in Germany – at a cost of billions annually – is no longer required and we can bring them home. This also means Germany, rather than the US, will be sending troops all over the world to fight “terrorism” – a move that is sure to cause consternation in certain regions with a history of German intervention, but hey, somebody has to do it!

The political class is screaming bloody murder over Trump’s performance at the G-7 meeting in Canada, where he reportedly spent most of the time detailing how much the US was paying for the defense of our vaunted “allies,” not to mention the high tariffs imposed on American goods. He then proposed a “free trade zone” in which member countries would drop all tariffs, subsidies, and other barriers to trade: the “allies” didn’t like that much, either. Nor did the alleged advocates of free trade here in the US give him any credit for ostensibly coming around to their point of view. Which reminds me of something Murray Rothbard said about this issue: “If authentic free trade ever looms on the policy horizon, there’ll be one sure way to tell. The government/media/big-business complex will oppose it tooth and nail.”

Of course the Euro-weenies don’t want real free trade: after all, they practically invented protectionism. What they want is a free ride, at Uncle Sam’s expense, and the reason they hate Trump is because they know the freebies are over. However, what really got the Usual Suspects frothing at the mouth was Trump’s insistence that Russia be readmitted to the G-8:

    “I think it would be good for the world, I think it would be good for Russia, I think it would be good for the United States, I think it would be good for all of the countries in the G-7. I think having Russia back in would be a positive thing. We’re looking to have peace in the world. We’re not looking to play games.”

The “experts” went crazy when he said this: our “allies” are being insulted, they wailed, while our “enemies” are being “appeased.” It’s sedition! Russia! Russia! Russia!

Eric Boehm says that the White House’s justification for imposing tariffs on national security grounds may have been undermined through Trump’s tweets hitting back after what he clearly felt was Justin Trudeau’s hissy fit (although Trudeau didn’t exactly break new ground or say anything radically different in his comments):

The Trump administration has spent months trying to construct a rather flimsy argument that steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other close American allies constitute a national security threat. More than a handy way to drum up public support for trade barriers, the “national security” claim is a crucial bit of the legal rationale for letting the president impose tariffs on those goods without congressional approval.

Then, as he was departing this past weekend’s G7 summit, Trump took to Twitter to air some grievences with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In doing so, the president may have significantly kneecapped that legal argument.

The last sentence of Trump’s tweet is the one that really matters.

The White House slapped a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum by invoking Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gives the president legal authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval when it’s for the sake of national security. That line of argument, outlined by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a February report, says that America needs aluminum and steel to make weapons of war, and that protecting the domestic steel and aluminum industries is the only way to ensure the country will be able to defend itself if attacked.

That is pretty weak, as I (and others) have written before. But as long as Trump makes that claim — no matter how strained the logic might be — the law seems to be on his side. Invoke “national security” and the president can do what he wants with trade.

Except now Trump seems to have admitted that it’s not about national security at all. His tweet plainly states that “our Tariffs [sic] are in response to his of 270% on dairy!”

Chris Selley points out that up until this eruption, Canadian politicians were still carrying on as if nothing was really at stake (especially Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who re-swore his allegiance to ultra-protectionist supply management at all costs, and damn actual free trade):

So utterly obsessed are Canadian politicians by the small differences between them that federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer recently demanded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explain what he meant when he suggested Canada might be “flexible” on the issue of supply management in the dairy industry, in the face of new demands from Washington. It’s preposterous: you can’t fit a processed cheese slice between the three major party’s total devotion to the dairy cartel.

Because, as we all know, what unites Canadians from coast-to-coast is our universally shared determination to pay significantly higher prices for dairy products, to ensure that Quebec farmers are not overly bothered by pesky competition from uppity foreigners who don’t even speak Joual…

June 11, 2018

Jay Currie says it’s time to light the Bat Signal for … Brian Mulroney?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I find it hard to believe that things have gotten to the point that anyone, let alone Jay Currie, is looking to former PM Brian Mulroney to pull Justin’s chestnuts out of the Trumpian fire:

In Canada, more specifically Ontario, the destruction of the auto industry would be a full scale, all hands on deck, disaster. Realistically, the auto sector is Ontario’s largest private sector employer and the largest manufacturing sector. Being priced out of the US market would kill tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.

Trump has taken the measure of Trudeau and his tiny, annoying, Minister of External Affairs, Chrystia Freeland and concluded they are featherweights. Which means that Canada is potentially screwed because Trump has no faith in our leadership. You don’t call people dishonest publicly if you plan to do business with them.

It is unlikely that Trudeau will be aware of just how badly he has failed for a few days. The Canadian media are heavily invested in a narrative which has Justin standing up to the big, bad, Trump. Trudeau’s tone-deaf advisors are, no doubt, revelling in the fact they got lots of “gender” language into the communique.

It will take a few days for the more sober side of the media to realize what peril Trudeau has put us in. And a few more for the geniuses in the PMO to figure out that Trump is not playing the same game as they are.

When they do figure it out the question will arise, “What the fuck do we do now?”

As I am quite sure Butz and his posse read this blog I have a simple suggestion.

Normally, I would have suggested they get in touch with Simon Reisman who negotiated both the Auto-Pact and NAFTA. Alas, Reisman is dead.

Second best by a long shot? Brian Mulroney. A man I have next to no time for but who a) managed to get Canadians onboard for NAFTA, b) was a quite successful Canadian Prime Minister, c) is wired into both Trump World and broad swaths of corporate America.

If Trudeau could get Mulroney to do it Mulroney would be going into the US with a serious, well thought out, everything on the table, pitch. Likely starting with first principles – no tariffs, no subsidies, no non-tariff barriers. Be prepared to dump dairy and end transhipment of Chinese steel. And pitch it to the Trump people as the template for the deals which could be made with the EU, Japan, India and so on. (China is a whole other thing.)

The key point here is that Canada has to move, and move quickly, away from the finger-wagging politics of gender inclusion and climate change to a hard-nosed business approach to getting the best deal we can with an America which is now willing to put its own interests first.

June 10, 2018

Why the Canadian media (and the Laurentian Elite) misjudge Trump

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell provides a thumbnail sketch of Donald Trump and suggests why the Canadian establishment finds him so hard to understand (and to work with):

In the view of Professors Bradbury and Leuprecht Canada and all of the US’ competitors are falling into Trump’s trap and the WTO ~ and global fair trade ~ will be the chief victim because, from President Trump’s perspective it is better that we all sink into poverty as long as the US remains top dog.

OK, what do we actually know about Donald Trump? What drives his policy choices?

I’m going to engage in a bit of ‘pop psychology’ and very personal speculation to try to clarify my own thoughts about President Trump as he prepares to meet, in just a few hours, with the G7 in Canada.

Is he stupid? No, not really … perhaps not “well read” as, say, most presidents from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson through to George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama were, but he’s not a stupid man. Is he intellectually lazy? I believe so … I think that explains why he is reported to dislike sitting through briefings and so on; he seems to want to follow his own instincts and cut through all the details, especially those which might not support his instinctive preferred course of action.

Is he a racist? The available evidence says “No,” he’s not. Is he Islamophobic? Not likely, I think. Is he a white supremacist? Not that, either, in my view, but it may be closer to his ‘basic instincts.’ He is, I suspect, something a kin to the Nativists who sprung up in mid 19th century America. He is, I believe, suspicious of everyone who is not a born and bred American. It not a racist or religious thing, it is simple nationalism of a rather narrow and nasty sort.

I think he is also, or wishes to be, an isolationist; I suspect he actively detests the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the World Court, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States, NATO and, possibly, even bilateral even NORAD because he sees each as an attempt by foreigners to entangle America and tie its hands. He is said to be less opposed to bilateral deals in which the US is, inevitably, the major partner but dislikes multi-lateral deals wherein American can be outnumbered and outvoted by others. he seems not to care who the “others” are … foreigners are foreigners, none are friends.

He is, as I have said before, an instinctive man; he makes up his mind quickly ~ although he may change it, by a full 180°, in hours or days ~ based on the evidence he wants to hear and believe, and I suspect that his instinctive reaction to the world is the America is like a modern day, national Gulliver, marooned in a hostile, greedy world and tied down by agreements and treaties and institutions created by little people …

… and then forced to abide by the little peoples’ rules.

[…]

His view of “winning,” it seems to me, owes more to Conan the Barbarian than to Adam Smith or Andrew Carnegie. Thus, I think Time has it about right … he wants to be an absolute monarch.

In fact, I think he shares Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “admiration” for China’s “basic dictatorship, which “allows them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Since I don’t think he, Trump, or Trudeau for that matter, knows much about economics I can only conclude that he admires Xi Jinping’s ability to exercise dictatorial power and throw his perceived enemies in jail on a whim.

That, I suspect, is President Trump’s “basic instinct:” he wants to be the absolute monarch of whatever enterprise with which he happens to be involved ~ property development, repeated bankruptcy proceedings, reality TV shows and now the US presidency. I’m guessing that we might have Donald Trump in the White House until 2020 … his view of America in the world, as Gulliver, is shared by many millions of his fellow citizens and the US Democrats seem, at best, incoherent in policy terms.

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