Who’s Leszek Balcerowicz? He was Poland’s Finance Minister in the country’s first non-communist government, then served twice as Deputy Prime Minister (1989–1991, 1997–2001) and as Chairman of the National Bank of Poland (2001–2007). He and his wife of 47 years, Ewa Balcerowicz, are economists. He oversaw Poland’s economic reforms from communist collectivism to free markets and democratic capitalism. By all accounts, it worked, while it failed in Russia, possibly owing to Russia’s penchant for sclerotic autocracy and state-empowered cronyism (let’s leave that for another time).
Why bring him up? He is the counterpoint to Trump and his bunch, the Fox News stable grafted onto the executive branch. I doubt seriously that Americans voted for isolationism and protectionism. Tariffs and withdrawal from the world didn’t show up in any polls of the public prior to November 4. Yet, those are what we are getting. Reluctance to defend the international order is evident in stories of Trump’s people pressuring Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and some voices in the administration expressing a willingness to cut Ukraine and NATO adrift. Protectionism is the sole remaining root for Trump’s tariff war on the world after every other explanation is reduced to incoherence. Balcerowicz’s story is a fresh breath of sanity in our domestic maelstrom of security and economic claptrap.
Balcerowicz faced a tall order in 1989 with the collapse of Poland’s communist regime. Collectivism, once begun, is like drug addiction. The recovery is hell, but eventually a healthier person is restored. Free market “shock therapy” was initiated, tough times ensued, Poland stuck with it, and today Poland is rivalling Japan in per capita income. It’s a lesson well worth remembering as we lurch toward Trump-inspired collectivist protectionism.
Heck, we can’t even reform our bankrupting entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) without a political bloodbath. Trump promises to do nothing about them, and is trying to centrally plan his autarkic economy through his “most beautiful word in the English language”, tariffs. Businesses are watching as their decades-long economic arrangements are hammered into rubble and markets tumble.
A marked contrast is Poland. Per capita (per person) GDP is a good measure of economic health. In 1990 it was Brazil-sized at $12,810, $4,000 behind Mexico’s. In 2023 it stands at $43,585, a mere $2,500 short of Japan’s (see #1). Japan, once the darling of industrial-policy Democrats with its state-management in The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), and an unacknowledged centerpiece of Trump’s economic outlook, has flatlined for three decades. Demographically, it is in the midst of social suicide with a 1.20 fertility rate, and now with an economy to match. Trump is eager to repeat the performance with his own MITI run out of the White House and his executive orders, something akin to imperial decrees.
Oh, 2026 is the year that Poland is projected to surpass Japan in per person wealth. Barring Trump dragging the world’s economy into the toilet, aka 1930, the future looks bright for a country near the front lines abutting Putin’s horde. Not so for us.
Poland shows the way forward, not Donald Trump. If only the Republicans had the guts to study the career of Leszek Balcerowicz. Instead, as they play footsie with Donald Trump, the tumbling securities markets forecast dark clouds. Sure, bear and bull markets do not always presage a nation’s future fortunes, but sometimes they do. All the elements of serious economic disruption are present: massive government meddling, Trump’s demand for irresponsible monetary policy to cover his tracks, shattered business relationships, mammoth uncertainty, and the beginning of the pullback of capital. If capital goes into hiding, we’re in serious trouble, Great Depression territory.
In the runup to our near future expect the demagoguery of all the Wall Street vs. Main Street blather to take center stage. The class warfare of J.D. Vance links rhetorical arms with AOC/Bernie Sanders. Is it all that inconceivable for our Vice-President to show up at AOC’s next “Fight Oligarchy” rally? One has to wonder. They might have to change the title to “Fight Wall Street”. Mmmmm, “Occupy Wall Street”? Are we there yet?
A simple economic lesson will be taught to our President and his palace coterie, while the rest of us live it. Wall Street and Main Street are as intertwined as Ford and its supply chain. They can’t occupy insular realms, bubbles, silos. A withholding of capital sets off dominoes that careen onto Main Street. Investors seek to avoid Trump-driven risks by not exposing their wealth (capital) to his whims. Following the inevitable chain of events, less capital means less maintenance and growth of enterprises which translates into less business for the diner and hardware store on Main Street.
It’s a lesson well understood by any economist worth their salt. Thank goodness Poland trusted theirs, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, and stayed the course. We, in America, would rather hitch our wagon to our erratic president, and his merry band of Fox News alumni, all adhering to his faulty presumptions. It’s great for Poland, bad for us.
RGraf
Sources:
1. Thanks to Dominic Pino of National Review for these insights in “The Stat: 2026” in National Review Magazine, May 2025, p.9.
Ford 2021 Bronco SUVs on the assembly line at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., June 14, 2021. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Sometime in early 2027, President Trump will probably be impeached . . . again. Why? When the party in power botches things, they’re normally punished at the polls — “It’s the economy, stupid!” Inflation, shortages, business closings, people thrown out of work, recessions/depressions, etc., won’t make for a winning message. That bodes ill for the already impeachment-prone Trump, leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of any effort to remove him from office.
People are already lining up to do the favor, or predicting it. The reliably extremist Democrat Al Green (the one removed for disrupting President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress) announced in February (see #1), “This president is unfit.” Further in the well of the House he said, “I rise to announce that I will bring articles of impeachment against the president for dastardly deeds proposed and dastardly deeds done.” Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon agrees. Four days after the November 4 election, Bannon augured (see #2),
“Hakeem Jeffries could be, will be, the speaker of the House in two years. And the first thing he will do in the early days of 2027 is move to impeach Donald Trump. Trust me. They’re gonna put $10 billion in back of him [to take the House]. They have nobody else.”
Trump is behaving in ways to prove them right. People vote their pocketbook. It’s more than a cliché. It’s true. Stake out a position that leads to harming the voters’ children and personal fortunes and they will send you packing. Biden and Kamala Harris, et al, are proof of concept. Trump is determined to join them.
I can’t think of a more politically self-destructive act than laying waste to a good portion of the economy just in time for the 2026 midterms. His tariff war – 10% across the board, 25% on our neighbors, potentially sky high on everybody else, and the concomitant uncertainty from all the flip flops – will wreak havoc on everything, maybe with the exception of most food processing. We’ll have food, but to hell with an affordable car, or truck, or SUV, or van, or 18-wheeler, if you can find one. Expect long lines at the grocery store filled with people holding food stamp (SNAP) EBT cards.
To bring home the consequences of the Trump foolishness, let’s just take a look at the rear undercarriage of an “American-made” SUV as it passes from the U.S. to Mexico, to Canada, and back to the U.S. The inputs for just the suspension strut towers go from Pennsylvania to Coahuila, Mexico, to Livonia, Michigan, for final assembly. The differential gearbox begins with aluminum from Quebec, then to casting in Coahuila, then for machining in Ontario, Canada, and then to North Carolina for assembly. The rubber bushings for the control arms starts with synthetic rubber from Monterrey, Mexico, and then to Iowa for their attachment to the control arms. The suspension’s cradle is from Kentucky, and other pieces such as the trailing blades and brackets emanate from Kentucky, Ontario, and Puebla, Mexico.
Assembly of the various parts into a rearend occurs at Vaughan, Ontario, and Detroit. Then it is rushed to Kansas City, Mo., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Windsor, Ontario, etc., for attachment to the final product. Under Trump’s tariff regime, the final product will be hemorrhaging blood from his tariffs. It’s insane.
Why the circuitous route? Doesn’t it seem unnecessarily complicated? Those questions would arise from your typically myopic and autarkic central planner, people like Peter Navarro and Donald Trump. This process pencils out in terms of value-added and cost-benefit according to the people with skin in the game. That’s what a market does when allowed to operate freely.
Why not just disentangle the various paths and make it all occur in the U.S.? Go ahead and try. Uprooting the suppliers and their plants will come at a terrible cost and take years. In the interim, people will be going to the polls to vote against the wreckage. The complexity of disentanglement was nicely expressed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, when he compared it to an omelet: “You can’t unscramble it once it’s done.”
Trump is Don Quixote charging windmills. Biden wanted to shove us into very expensive golf carts masquerading as family sedans. With Trump, even that screwball option may not be available. I don’t know about you but I’m keeping my 10-year-old Tundra and 9-year-old Venza. Buying new ones is likely to be a nightmare. Expect the entire auto industry to pull back as well. Now that’s the making of economic hard times.
Will the Democrats finally succeed in adding Donald Trump’s scalp to their lance this time? Well, as they say, third time is the charm.
RGraf
Sources:
1. “Donald Trump Faces New Impeachment Bid After Speech to Congress”, Martha McHardy, Newsweek, 3/5/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-impeachment-al-green-2039765
2. “Steve Bannon Warns of Potential Third Donald Trump Impeachment”, Aila Slisco, Newsweek, 11/8/2024, at https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warns-potential-third-donald-trump-impeachment-1983079
3. Thanks to Ryan Mills of National Review for his piece “North America’s Auto Supply Chain Took Decades to Build. Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush It” at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/north-americas-auto-supply-chain-took-decades-to-build-trumps-tariffs-could-crush-it/
President Donald Trump holds a “Foreign Trade Barriers” document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
“Lies and victimhood make evil possible.” — quote attributed to Dennis Prager
Well, maybe not evil, or maybe so, but lies and victimhood are certainly not a recipe for success. The Left has long been in the grip of victimhood. It’s the base alloy for its DEI, CRT, critical legal theory, and all its “systematic” ideologies that have plagued us since they became Democratic Party dogma in the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Now, the Right has its own version in MAGA. And as John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival sang, “I see a bad moon rising”.
Why the pessimism? The Right morphed from being a correction to the Left’s manias to a thoroughgoing embrace of one of their big ones, victimhood. It’s in the MAGA title – Make America Great Again – meaning that America is a victim of a dizzying array of charlatans and miscreants, foreign and domestic. It’s a recurring script, pathetic as it may be, nothing new in the history of the world.
In that sense, we are busy making ourselves not “exceptional”. It’s not inevitable. We choose to be that way by electing leaders and absorbing their dark frame of mind. Donald Trump’s tariff war on the world is a play on this depressing display of American victimhood.
What’s more, it is based on falsehoods. The villain is said to be free trade, whether under the initials NAFTA or TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) or GATT or WTO, and we are said to be chumps, patsies, and victims in the story. Yet, for allegedly being fools, we are outpacing the rest of the world. Trump’s “Great Again” schtick actually misses the boat, and is working feverishly to have us join the rest of the G7 in missing the boat.
Let’s count the ways. The UK, Germany, and Japan have flatlined in GDP growth for at least 5 years or more (three decades for Japan). China’s 30-year spurt of phenomenal growth is levelling off, which is not surprising since they started from essentially zero; they’re export reliant economy is highly cyclical; and the central planning of industrial policy is famous for spectacular highs followed by spectacular lows, like a meth addict. The Soviet Union had 80 years of it and it imploded in the course of a week in 1991.
As for “Great Again”, we are already great and getting greater as the others languish. So says The Economist in its October 2024 report titled, “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust” (see #1). How so? At the start of NAFTA, we were about 40% of total GDP of the G7 countries. Today, we’re 50%. Globally, we were 21% of the world’s economy in 2012; today finds us at 26%.
Personal measures of wealth show us to be unsurpassed. Back to The Economist (see #1 and #2), “Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.” We’re also more productive per worker. Canada’s is 70% of ours. China is a third (and falling). If this makes us “chumps”, we should pray for the condition to continue.
So, Trump’s answer is a tariff war on the world and more caterwauling about our victimhood. Go figure. On April 2, he marched up to the microphone waving a piece of agitprop titled “Foreign Trade Barriers” as if any of it matters. Ironically, these alleged foreign government manipulations of trade haven’t made them any richer as we sailed past them. “Foreign Trade Barriers” is irrelevant in the big yacht race of life.
Trump and MAGA world can’t accept the fact that our economy is different, as different as our 1890 economy was from colonial times. Ag shrunk dramatically as a slice of the American economy back then, so an 1890 Trump and Peter Navarro (Trump’s sage of trade) would be running around pushing William T. Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” as a plank in their “Make America Great Again” campaign. To heck with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Ford; and to heck with 21st-century Navarro’s craze for manufacturing. It would have been stillborn if this dynamic duo had their way at the dawn of American global economic dominance.
Peter Navarro at the White House
21st-century America isn’t a manufacturing basket case. The value of our manufacturing is larger today than it was 1990. We just employ fewer people as we manufacture more higher-end goods. As Rich Lowry puts it in his piece (see #2), “As we have lost jobs in manufacturing (5 million since 1990), we’ve picked them up in services (nearly 12 million) and in transportation and logistics (more than 3 million).” More tech and aerospace and less textiles and shoes. Those service jobs don’t concentrate around the burger-flipper sector. If they did, they’d be the most expensive burger-flippers since Ray Kroc, since the birth of the Whopper, that is Wagyu-paddied Whoppers.
Trade barriers or no, the proof is in the pudding. But Navarro doesn’t eat pudding, at least not the kind of pudding produced by our economy.
Navarro, Trump’s buddy in protectionism, has always been a loud advocate of central planning, government management of economic activity, in its reincarnation in Democrat neo-socialist “industrial policy”, and more. Before he joined the Trump circus, Navarro was part of the emerging California Democrat “establishment” in the 1990s that would come to dominate the state down to the present day.
By 1998, the Democrat tone for California was set in the words of people like Navarro (see #4). Eco-manias and growth-control was the zeitgeist of his campaigns for elective offices in San Diego in the 1990s. He headed an activist group called “Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN)”, of San Diego, and pushed almost any measure at hand to restrict the housing supply, such as preventing migration into the city, growth-control ordinances, tight controls on sewer and water hookups, fees, fees, and more fees, etc. It’s a familiar story that began in Petaluma in the 1960s and spread up and down the state’s populous coastal plain.
Navarro was hip deep in branding the word “developer” as something akin to “child molester”. Without his type of apparatchiks at the helm of local government power, according to Navarro, developers “will leave air pollution, overcrowded schools, underpoliced streets, sewer systems bursting at their seams, and traffic jams that can (and often do in California) make grown men cry.”
Today, Californians are crying, despondent over their inability to afford shelter and having to flee to other states not so beholden to the California Navarros. California has a serious housing shortage, duhhh! Getting approval to nail two studs together is a nightmare in the state. Decades of hostility to supply has attracted some roosting chickens. The chronically constrained supply has propelled the median rent in the state to $2,850, 33% higher than the national average (see #5).
Navarro’s legacy is Democrat Assemblyman Corey Jackson of Riverside. Jackson recently proposed a bill that would allow college students to sleep in their cars because many can’t afford California rent (see #7). People that think like Navarro have engineered a housing market that has relegated students to their cars. Expect student parking lots to resemble homeless encampments. What Navarro helped to bring about in California, he promises for the entire nation when Trump assigned to him the role of influencer to tinker around in the nation’s economic relations with the world.
It’s not that Trump is unaware of Navarro’s inclinations. He agrees with Navarro. Trump and Navarro have a childlike zero-sum view of the world. Bill Fulton, former head of San Diego planning, noticed the symmetry between Trump’s view of trade and slow-growthers like Navarro (see #3): “More development creates losers as well as winners, so you’d better box out the bad development or at least make those developers pay through the nose.” A rising tide raising all boats, or a growing pie that unavoidably means bigger slices for everyone, is inconceivable to someone like Navarro. Thanks to Trump, Navarro has the opportunity to muck up the nation’s economy like he helped to do for the housing supply in California.
Steve Bannon
And he’s doing it along with another fellow traveler in MAGA world, Steve Bannon. Navarro wants to centrally plan trade with his beloved tariffs. Bannon wants to bash the rich with tax increases. Here’s Bannon (see #6):
“That’s why it’s so important to not extend the tax cuts for the wealthy and actually do more tax cuts for working class people. We do this, that is a fundamental shift politically that will cement in the foundational elements for a 1932-type realignment.”
Update to Steve Bannon (see #8): the top 20% of income earners pay 83.6% of federal income taxes. As for the bottom rungs straying into the middle and working classes, the bottom 20% only get money out of the system. Their income tax rate is negative, -4.3%. The next 20% from the bottom pays essentially 0% at 0.1%. What does Bannon want, out and out income confiscation? That would place him in the company of Lenin.
Why not just vote for Democrats? MAGA is associated with the wrong party. Bannon believes, like Navarro, like Democrats, that government can micromanage us into utopia. Bannon opines on the tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering while bashing other Republicans as follows, “He’s [Trump] furthering the economics of working-class and middle-class America, and it cements the fact that the Republicans are not the country club Republicans of the Bush junta.” So, according to Bannon and any other socialist who has graced the public stage, government is the fount of all good things, and no need to pull the rug back on a ravaged housing supply and American economy as they feed The Wealth of Nations and Reaganomics into the shredder.
Such is the nature of Populism. It is the repository of crackpots, of anyone who wishes to steer government bennies to favored victims, while making real victims of those seen in a lesser light. Now we see the real home of zero-sum and it is in city hall, the state capitol, Washington, D.C., and the myriads of agencies and government offices scattered across the fruited plain. A favored few demographics are rewarded at the expense of the vast millions. None of it works, and results in the loaded U-Hauls exiting California and thousands thrown out of work by enterprises starved for capital and nonfunctioning supply chains.
Senator Russell B. Long put it best when he said in 1973, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” Welcome to the Populism of Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, and the erratic and incoherent Donald J. Trump.
It’s more than Populism that ties them together. It’s the pathetic wallowing in victimhood. It blinds a person to a reality that isn’t as dismal as these lunkheads make it out to be. It heaps blame on others and diminishes personal responsibility. In a nutshell, it is as Dennis Prager put it, “Lies and victimhood make evil possible.”
Yes, the pity party is getting tiresome.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust”, Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr, The Economist, October 14, 2024, at https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/the-american-economy-has-left-other-rich-countries-in-the-dust
2. Thanks to Rich Lowry for bringing these insights to my attention in “Guess What? We’re Already Rich”, National Review, 4/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/04/guess-what-were-already-rich/
3. “How San Diego’s housing wars helped Peter Navarro shape Trump’s trade wars”, Andrew Keatts, Anxios, 4/15/2025, at https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2025/04/15/san-diego-housing-war-peter-navarro-trump-trade-war-tariff
4. Check out Peter Navarro’s own words in his “Peter Navarro fights Lynn Schenk, Susan Golding, Nancy Casady to run for Congress”, authored in 1998 during his run for Congress, at https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1998/apr/23/san-diego-confidential/
5. “Rent drives up California’s cost of living”, Lynn La, Cal Matters, 8/2/2024, at https://calmatters.org/newsletter/california-cost-of-living-rent-increases/
6. “Republicans Weigh Raising Taxes on Highest Earners”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 4/15/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/republicans-weigh-raising-taxes-on-highest-earners/
7. “California Bill Proposes Letting Students Sleep in Cars On Campus”, KFI 640 AM, 4/14/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-bill-proposes-letting-students-sleep-in-cars-on-campus/ar-AA1CTKhM
8. “Is it True the Rich Don’t Pull Their Weight When it Comes to Paying Taxes?”, Amelia Kuntzman and Sara Wagoner, Economic Policy Innovation Center, 4/14/2025, at https://epicforamerica.org/federal-budget/is-it-true-the-rich-dont-pull-their-weight-when-it-comes-to-paying-taxes/
9 Much thanks to Dominic Pino at National Review for his socioeconomic breakdown of tax receipts in “Top 40 Percent of Earners Pay Nearly All Federal Income Taxes” at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/top-40-percent-of-earners-pay-nearly-all-federal-income-taxes/
President Donald Trump reacts as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2025. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
In a career in the public eye, Donald Trump hasn’t hesitated to brag about his IQ. In 2013, he posted on Twitter (see #1), “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” He’s repeated it often enough to not dismiss it as just a joke.
Which brings to mind Stephen Hawking’s quip about IQ braggarts (see #3): “People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.”
The fact of the matter is, no one, not even Donald Trump, knows his IQ. I can only conclude from his abundant public utterings that this is no “genius” at work. He may have some competence in a particular narrow field, but he is ill-informed or filled with coarse opinions outside of it. Typical of this form of Trump-speak is today’s jewel (4/7/2025) from Truth Social (see #4):
“Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place. This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate. They’ve made enough, for decades, taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA! Our past ‘leaders’ are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Here’s a few takeaways. This is no “genius” at work. Declaring victory in his trade war against the world is a bit premature, only 4 days after he declared economic war on the world. Interesting side note: Where’s Congress as the president on his lonesome declares a trade war against the planet?
The purpose of tariffs is to punish foreigners and American consumers, not to rake in “Billions of Dollars” for subsidy boondoggles or to make the tax cuts and the tax-free tips, overtime, and Social Security pandering pencil-out for the Congressional Budget Office. As is likely, the overall economy will take a hit when the economic casualties from the trade war roll in: all tax revenue starts to slide, and business and personal spending begins to crater. Not more money but less is in the offing.
Littered throughout in this piece from the “genius” is the pathetic complaints of the constantly aggrieved, America as a victim of the entire world. If this came from one of my children, after the tantrum, I’d send the kid to their room after a serious come-to-Jesus moment. Instead, we make the guy president.
It says a lot about us, or does it? People vote for a person for any number of reasons. Nowhere, not in any pollsters’ surveys were tariffs on the list of most serious concerns of voters. It is for Trump, and they are a key to his understanding of the world. We weren’t necessarily bamboozled. We heard the tariff talk, but relegated it to the back of our mind, reminding ourselves of the pre-pandemic Trump I and the wreckage left by the Dems. We didn’t vote for Trump wreckage.
Trump may think himself a “genius”. Instead, what we got was your average, run-of-the-mill big blowhard. I’ve experienced such people throughout my life. You’ll find them in locker rooms, bars, among friends and family. We just happen to have one in the Oval Office. And he’s making us look pathetic. MAGA must be replaced with MAPA, Make America Pathetic Afterward.
RogerG
Sources:
1. This Trump IQ braggadocio can be found on X at https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/332308211321425920
2. More occasions for Trump’s bragging can be read at “Donald Trump’s IQ obsession, in 22 quotes”, Chris Cillizza, CNN, 10/10/2017, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/10/politics/donald-trump-tillerson-iq/index.html
3. The Hawking quote can be read at https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings/stephen-hawking-people-who-boast-about-their-i-q-are-losers
4. This example of Trump braggadocio can be read from his Truth Social account at https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114296287858068040
5. Thanks for the insights from the inestimable Jim Geraghty of National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/why-team-trump-is-so-gung-ho-about-tariffs/
Then-President-elect Donald Trump walks with Then-President Joe Biden at the White House on the inauguration day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2025. (photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters)
Remember the Biden Left’s attempt to paste “greed”, “price gouging”, “greedflation”, and “price fixing” on the broad price jumps during his time in office? Biden’s head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, threatened FTC investigations and prosecutions for the assumed price gouging. Well, the little girl in front of the snowy tv screen in the movie “Poltergeist” put it best when she said, “They’re baaaack!” What’s baaaack? The Biden-type threats of investigations and prosecutions of American businesses for legitimately responding to price signals, this time by Trump and his people.
The scrambling by American businesses to reconstruct their elaborate supply chains and respond to Trump-induced demand pressures for wholly American-made goods and services will force our enterprises into a completely untenable position. Prices will have to rise, sometimes quite dramatically, to recover the costs of this increased burden or face serious economic injury. Businesses are in the jaws of the vice: crippling costs and Trump threats.
So, here comes the Bidenesque threats. On X, Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s FTC Chairman, posted this:
“President Trump is reorienting our nation’s economy to put Americans first. As we adjust to the new economic order, the @FTC will be watching closely to make sure American companies are vigorously competing on prices. These necessary tariffs should not be interpreted as a green light for price fixing or any other unlawful behavior. We will always protect American consumers.” (See #1)
Notice the continuity of jargon – “price fixing”? Notice the central planning instinct – “new economic order”?
Andrew Ferguson, FTC ChairmanLina Khan, Biden’s FTC Chair
And this on top of Trump’s earlier verbal dagger directed at auto CEOs to not raise prices in the wake of his auto tariffs. It came through a conference call with auto execs in early March (see #3).
Trump and his people are unintentionally acknowledging that his beloved tariffs are economic disasters. He may succeed for a time in dampening prices in sheer totalitarian intimidation, but the severe costs of monumental dislocation will ooze out anyway. Don’t expect “onshoring” to save our bacon. It may occur to some extent but it won’t make up for the massive losses throughout the broad reach of the economy. Save 1,000 jobs by sacrificing 75,000. GDP won’t grow in spite of the “onshoring”. It will fall and then stagnate. That’s the lesson of the 1930s.
On one thing, Trump was completely honest when he said, “I couldn’t care less if they [the auto companies] raise prices . . . .” It’s the mindset of a central planner. Do you think for a moment that Stalin cared about the individual Russian peasant or worker in his collectivization of agriculture into communes (“kolkhozes”) and the “Industrialization” of his Five Year Plans? Trump’s response is what one should expect from the emotionless gaze of the zealous ideologue with great power. Trump is a doctrinaire utopian, and that puts him in the same league with the eco-totalitarians of the Green New Deal.
You didn’t know it – me included – but you may have voted for Ross Perot (reincarnated, of course) and his Reform Party when you checked Trump’s box on the ballot. The tariff fetish was central to Perot and his Reform Party, and that’s where we found Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s where we find him today.
Trump and Ross Perot
Yep, Trump is a “disruptor”, as Lenin and Stalin were before him. The 20th century was littered with them. Sadly, it seems to come with so-called “change-agents” of whatever stripe.
RogerG
Sources:
1. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s threat can be found on X at https://x.com/AFergusonFTC/status/1907864397822787768
2. Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for alerting me to Ferguson’s X post in “Tariff Tales: Borrowing from the Biden Playbook?” in National Review’s The Corner of 4/5/2025 at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tariff-tales-borrowing-from-the-biden-playbook/
3. “Trump Warned U.S. Automakers Not to Raise Prices in Response to Tariffs”, Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton, Wall Street Journal, 3/27/2025, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-warned-us-automakers-not-to-raise-prices-in-response-to-tariffs/ar-AA1BOeKQ
Trump and his tariff executive order, April 2025Clash between Trump supporters and the radical Left in Washington, D.C., December 2020
Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” around the turn of the century, 1599 or 1600. In a story that loosely shadows the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the Bard of Avon presents a tale of hubris, sycophancy, cowardice, and vengeance. The timeline went from “crossing the Rubicon” to the “Ides of March” – “Et tu, Brute” – “Even you, Brutus”. The real story is one of overweening ambition for fame, glory, and power, a chief feature of the politics of the late Roman Republic. The Roman Senate had begun to neuter itself in destructive and self-negating factions. When it finally rose up, it was too late. In the end, after the ascension of Augustus, the empty shell of the republican form was kept, but the reality was an empire with an emperor, an emperator, an autocrat.
Was the rise and fall of Julius Caesar really the end of the republic? Actually, it could rightly be argued that the crisis had been building over the prior century in occasional civil wars and dictatorships. So, a single break point can be difficult to perceive. Murkiness is a constant problem in historical analysis. Nonetheless, a well-trodden path is discernable, and a superficial facade of government took shape. Are we there yet?
Emperor Augutus presiding over the Roman Senate
Appearances matter, but are false. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 was an exemplar of consensual governance and personal rights, in print form only. The reality was clearly different, as exemplified by the NKVD, purges, and a vast gulag archipelago. Adolph Hitler ruled under the emergency provisions of Article 48 of the democratic Weimar Constitution. He had no other constitution. He combined the executive offices of chancellor and president unto himself under an Article 48 “emergency” (the 1933 Reichstag fire, the “Jewish Menace”, the “Red Menace”, etc.) and he was off and running. Are we there yet?
“Emergencies” abound in these scenarios, and are frequently conjured, or grossly exaggerated, for political gain. Is America following a similar arc? Our arc could be said to have begun with the rise of a political movement, Progressivism, with a lot of late 19th century Populism thrown into the mix. The “messiness” of real consensual government with its localism, smelly back rooms, federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances was thought to be in need of streamlining by a strong chief executive and his administration of “experts”. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson laid out the rationale and FDR raised it to an art form, followed by a host of Democrats from JFK and his “best and brightest” (mostly Ivy League grads), LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, to Joe Biden. And, now, the Republicans add their own entrant to the list in the person of Donald Trump.
Congress delegated the tariff power to the president in “emergencies” – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – and sealed their fate by allowing him to define it. The seed was sown and our arc proceeded. A prior Republican president toyed with emergency-autocracy – Nixon and his wage-and-price controls in the “Nixon Shock” of 1971 – but none operated with such brashness and bravado, completely ignoring the legislative branch, as Donald Trump did in his edict of across-the-board tax increases, his tariff taxes on the world, literally the world. It’s breathtaking.
Congress is only left with a veto. But Congress is a shell of its former self, as the Roman Senate was in confronting Sulla or Julius Caesar. One faction, Trump’s fellow Republicans, have mostly fallen into Trump sycophancy (Caesar sycophancy?) and will prevent Congress from reasserting its Constitutional powers. A few Senate Republicans bucked the toadyism and voted with the minority Democrats to approve a resolution opposing the prior tariff edict on Canada. The House leadership, all Republicans, stonewalled the move to condemn Trump’s imperial decree. Thus, the proposal was relegated to irrelevancy. Evenly divided between Caesaristic sycophancy and neo-Marxism, Congress has cancelled itself.
The irony of it all is that the Democrats are not a responsible alternative. The picture resembles the street scenes of Berlin in 1920s Weimar Germany. Patriotic German war vets faced off against the Bolshevik-inspired Reds in street battles. Many vets were drawn to ultra-right rhetoric and its mythology of victimhood about the war (WWI) while the Reds were excited for headway in the international proletarian revolution. Today, the choice facing Americans is between neo-Marxism (the Democrats) and a mythology of perpetual American victimhood (the Trump Republicans).
The German Freikorps of the Right in 1920s BerlinThe Roter Frontkämpfer-Bund, the paramilitary of the Reds in Berlin, June 1927
The victimhood angle of the ultra-right in Germany – the “stab in the back” legend – strikingly parallels the trade victimhood of the Trump Right. Victimhood sold well in 1917 Russia, 1920s and 30s Germany, and apparently so in America of the 21st century’s third decade. Victimhood is embraced by both the left and right. Both have their competing oppressor/oppressed schticks.
History provides examples of these various appeals devolving into the leadership of a single person, the so-called cult of personality. The leader alone (Marx, Lenin, il Duce, etc.) are thought to possess the unique gifts of foresight to establish the “truth” and the “path forward”. Power accumulates in the hands of the leader and a select few around him. He is acclaimed to be the embodiment of wisdom.
Roman emperors carried the title of Augustus – exalted, venerable. Emperor was the reality, but they were construed to be the wise guarantors of the “rights” and “prosperity of the people”, and the nation’s “protector”. Their power need have no constitutional writ, but these suzerains still felt compelled to maintain the illusion of a republic.
At this point, the system falls victim to Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Like all accurate insights into the human condition, it is rooted in human nature and thus a warning for all time. It’s a testament on how a professed victimhood can lead to a real and widespread victimhood. The movement’s scheme of centralized economic decision-making can’t work. Real functional knowledge is naturally dispersed among millions of actors in a free market. When that freedom is replaced by the “wisdom” of the one or a few, whether it be a politburo, a Soviet Gosplan, or handpicked toadies in the Council of Economic Advisers to reorder the entire world’s trading system, the wheels come off the cart. We’ve seen this play out time and time again. Well, here we go again.
Friedrich Hayek
The light hand of negotiations and trade deals is replaced by the heavy hand of Trump’s tariff Frankenstein. Your friends become cynical of you, and your enemies remain as they were, with a few more joining their ranks.
An examination of Trump’s tariff monster makes this clear. Who gets hit by Trump’s tariff truncheon? Everybody, friends and foes alike; well, no, not everybody, nor evenly. Friends get especially slammed because they are friends. We trade with them a lot and therefore they run the risk of having a “trade surplus” with us. The economic munchkins running the tariff show in Trump ll are fixated on “trade deficits” and “trade surpluses”. They are all that matters to these blinkered apparatchiks.
Their magic tariff formula is based on our “trade deficit” with that country, with a 10% floor, not that nation’s tariffs. So, the much-ballyhooed reciprocity argument is made mute. Others in the media, such as Hugh Hewitt, try to act as shaman of Trump’s brain like an ancient seer reading a flock birds before a battle, trying their best to make sense of Trump’s recklessness. Reciprocity was one angle. Then it was Trump implementing the Art of the Deal. When that couldn’t hold water, national security against the threat of the CCP jumped to the top of the shrinking list of rationales. Then the tariffs targeted the world, with or without the CCP, with no guarantee that they’ll be dropped, or if they’re negotiable.
That leaves my pet theory for Trump’s tariff fetish. Look no further than Trump’s 1990s dalliance with the Perot/Buchanan Reform Party and their fixation on Perot’s “great sucking sound” (jobs lost to Mexico). Vance alluded to it – self-sufficiency – in his recent verbal fusillade directed at RedState blogger Bonchie. The word for national self-sufficiency is autarky. The ancient, primitive drive for national or tribal self-sufficiency – autarky – has fueled the lust for conquest and empire for thousands of years. The peaceful trade to fill national or tribal needs and wants is seen as less ennobling than the thrill of military subjugation. The Mongols headed south to conquer China, then the Hun bands headed west to lay waste to Russia and the Hungarian plain, threatening the Roman Empire. Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 was emblematic of autarky in the form of “lebensraum”. 19th century colonialism rode on its back. Don’t trade, seize, and in that way achieve self-sufficiency.
Attila and his Huns in their drive for autarky
For Trump, take the Panama Canal and Greenland, intimidate Canada into being a client state, and punish American consumers for preferring foreign goods while simultaneously terrorizing American firms from their overseas economic arrangements. Bring everybody home and lock up the country while expanding its territorial reach. Attila would be envious.
Autarky is a fool’s errand. Poor countries are self-sufficient. They never develop; they are stunted. Development requires freedom, not an empowered few implementing the errant beliefs of a hubristic leader and his claque. America under Trump is forsaking the decades-long web of peaceful and voluntary trade arrangements for the diktats of what has quickly come to resemble an imperial court. The spectacle would have been familiar to anyone given access to Attila’s tent.
The metamorphosis of the Right is shocking to behold. Former free traders when Reagan was around have morphed into full-blown protectionists in the reign of Trump. Take talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Yesterday, he announced his fealty to protectionism (4/3/2025), eliminating all pretense. The arguments are the same, old and worn out as those of 17th century French mercantilists (refuted by Adam Smith) and the central planners of the 1980s Democrats’ “industrial policy” (in opposition to Reagan’s tax cuts, free markets, and free trade). The Republican Hewitt is now a 1980s Democrat, or an acolyte of Louis XIV’s First Minster of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The operative catalyst of the flip-flop is the presence of Donald Trump. A mania builds around a person and others quickly fall in line. The Right and its media web are as busy discrediting themselves in their fealty as the legacy media in their fawning support of the Democrat Left.
Warning! Choose wisely the horse to hitch your wagon.
The big question remains. Are we now ruled by an imperator, a person powerful enough to dismantle with a single stroke of his pen the long-established and peaceful economic arrangements of millions of people? Are our choices limited to Caesarism or neo-Marxism? It seems to be so. It’s the 1920s Berlin street confrontations of extremists all over again. In such circumstances, can the republic long survive? I am beginning to have my doubts.
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, in 2024
All 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are exposed in the 2026 midterm election. What will the political climate look like after another two years of Donald Trump? Midterms are not kind to incumbents, possibly due to the regular foot-in-mouth disease that breaks out at the dawn of a new administration. It provides additional advantages to an out-party motivated and keen to score hits. The blowback from the gaffe is compounded if it is an affront to the movement’s success in the first place.
Obama had his “… it’s not surprising … they [people in flyover country] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them ….” He added to his list of blunders with the howler, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”, which the reliably left-of-center PolitiFact honored with its 2013 Lie of the Year (see #1). It is much more than gaffes, but they work to illuminate policy goofs.
No wonder the Tea Party entered history, and in the 2010 midterms Democrats surrendered their 79-seat majority in the House and 14-seat advantage in the Senate to a Republican majority of 59 seats and whittled a Democrat edge in the Senate to 4. Republicans swept into control of more statehouses and governor’s mansions during the time of the Obama wrecking ball. The mouth has consequences.
Speed forward to 2025 and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is tasting his toes with, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Certainly, that one is easy to demagogue, and Democrats will, but it is not as if he did not take the sock off and contort himself into position. The jump in the prices of everything – and state-sponsored teenage genital mutilation, XY girls in XX girls’ sports, and the Third World moving into the country en masse without restraint – was an affront in voters’ minds November 2024.
Bessent was twisting himself in knots to justify Trump’s tariffs. When an incoherent idea meets the spoken word, get ready for the speaker to be reminded of the need to wash their feet. Tariffs have inflation written all over them, unless they are mitigated by the economic growth hormones of deregulation, tax cuts, sane energy policy, and cheaper financial capital. How much will they limit the damage? Hard to say. Timing and reactions abroad matter a lot.
Trump acknowledges in a rhetorical sleight of hand the harm of the tariff poison. In his speech to Congress, he pandered to farmers and then asked them to bear with him because he knows their exports will be the first to be targeted in retaliation. He asked the rest of the economy to bear with him as well. The foreign reaction to his tariffs was swift. Justin Trudeau of Canada announced (see #2), “Our tariffs will remain in place until the U.S. trade action is withdrawn, and should U.S. tariffs not cease, we are in active and ongoing discussions with provinces and territories to pursue several non-tariff measures.” Mexico and China responded likewise.
Markets did not react any better. The S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq Composite fell dramatically on the news (see #2). With Trump injecting himself into trade relationships, it is bad for business, which means it is bad for workers and everyone with a retirement plan. Instability and government intervention are bad, bad.
Why must we cut Trump some slack? Price increases are on the way; that is how tariffs work. So, get ready, Trump’s chief complaint against Biden, inflation, will be magically turned into a blessing by those who flipped like a light switch on the cue of their Pied Piper.
Crony capitalism is not the answer. Government goodies in the form of handouts to highly organized special interests mean costs imposed on everybody else. Trump shovels bennies to the United Steelworkers or the United Auto Workers but nonunion competitors are left to languish, with the consumer left to scramble to balance the checkbook.
Mancur Olson
The acclaimed economist Mancur Olson staked his academic reputation to his discernment of the socio-economic physics of the naturally skewed incentives to raid the public trough because rewards are targeted but costs are diffuse (see #3). A tightly organized interest (for instance, a large business entity and its allied labor magnificos) will beat out broader and thus more scattered interests (such as competitors and business and personal consumers). Welcome to the Trump mind. He is all into it.
Add it all up and one is left to wonder, can our leaders get any more incoherent?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’”, PolitiFact, at https://www.politifact.com/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/
2. “Trump trade war intensifies as tariffs go into place”, Ian Swanson, et al, The Hill, 3/4/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5174579-donald-trump-trade-war-intensifies/
3. Look to Mancur Olson’s seminal work, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, 1965. An exploration of the topic can be found in “The Power of Special Interests”, John Samples, CATO Institute, Fall 2010, at https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2010/book-review-lobbying-policy-change-case-gridlock
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)
Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, first verse:
“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a foot-loose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need”
Needs and wants, there’s a difference. Mick Jagger knew it. Needs are fundamental; wants are desires, the things that we would like. In normal times, the two are mangled beyond recognition, doubly so in election season.
Both parties – one a neo-Marxist enterprise, the other a personality cult – are in a mad dash to pander to the so-called middle and working classes, non-college educated. By so doing, the two parties in this time of voting advocate a command economy for the benefit of this general mass of people who work by the clock, do contract labor, and own small businesses. Here’s a splash of cold water: command economies don’t work, no matter their alleged beneficiary. Why? They’re commanded by the government, it’s employees and politicians. Any goodies granted one group come at the expense of the others, not just the rich, and will include many in the middling ranks of the socioeconomic pyramid. It’s the philosophy of beggar-thy-neighbor. That’s all that governments can do. Any bennies for blue collars – or the middle class – will come at the expense of the gradual negation of their own jobs and the futures of their children as future growth is diminished by “fair share” demagoguery against the rich. We’ll pay in more ways than one, not just at the checkout counter. The economic math is inexorable.
Though, to be real, today, the college-educated aren’t any more cognitively advantaged than the non-college educated. Many BAs, maybe most, are just proofs of indoctrination in claptrap. Indoctrination is not education.
The claptrap may help explain the broad acceptance of economic nonsense. A belief is deeply embedded that our specie of unionization is good, that you can wall off the country from foreign competition, hike taxes on the rich, and ignore the rest of the world, and everything will be hunky-dory. That isn’t a realistic game plan. It’s merciless, incremental national suicide.
Anyway, such is the political fashion of the time. Warning: fashionable politics and economic good sense don’t mix, like drinking and driving.
Profoundly galling is the demagogic blue-collar suck-up from both parties in the form of a love affair with “coerced” unionization, for that’s what we’re talking about, coerced. Of course, “coerced” is a yucky word, so they want to leave it at simple “unionization”. But honesty demands that we realize that the NEA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Teamsters, the entire litany of labor monopolists, actually demand “compulsory” (coerced) membership for everyone in the workplace. These folks aren’t into “voluntary”.
Their political word play doesn’t clarify squat. More of the word play clouds the picture even more. Coerced unionization comes in something referred to as “collective bargaining”. The question is, for them and everybody else, how to make a “collective” out of an inchoate mass of workers of divergent individual interests and beliefs? Answer: set up a system of legal protocols to force everyone into the thing, that’s how. A monopoly of labor under one set of masters, that’s how. Use the power of the state to impose one man, one vote, one time, since it’s harder than hell to decertify the labor monopoly once it’s established. After the initial certification vote to create the thing, you might be able to opt out, but you’re still going to have to pay for the thing (in California, “agency fees”). And don’t underestimate the organization’s creative bookkeeping to vacuum as much as possible out of every employee’s paycheck into the union treasury.
And guess what the dues-fueled slush fund goes for? Politics and more politics. These unions realize that their very existence is dependent on the power of the state to create and enforce the protocols that create them. Their existence and power are dependent on the state. Limited government, on the other hand, by definition, leaves little opportunity to hobnob with politicians to make law to squash dissenters at the workplace. That’s the reason for the unions’ hearty distaste for our constitutional republic. By definition, a constitution limits government power to what’s written. Big Labor demands what’s not written and therefore legally impermissible, and progressivism obliges. Progressives (in today’s parlance, neo-Marxists), as the unions’ chief political benefactors, simply interpret The Constitution out of the way by calling it a “living constitution”. How convenient.
In the end, these politically privileged labor monopolies cannibalize their own industries and morph into pillars of radical cultural revolution, ready to join their lefty comrades at the parapets. Industries flee their self-destructive grip; opportunities decay for upward mobility; many of its members discover their daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with XY “girls”; and their schools, streets, parks, and downtowns are dangerous pits of despair. So much for “look for the union label”. This ain’t your grandpa’s UAW.
In fact, the UAW eyes richer fields to plow in organizing tomorrow’s cultural revolutionaries in the growing cadres of college teaching assistants. Imagine it, your son or daughter might be taught or their papers graded by a Hamas-loving activist who can’t be removed due to the protective political and legal force field provided by the UAW. It’s happening in California. The UAW has jumped on board the organizing gravy train of public employment, the very thing that has rendered California irredeemably ungovernable. California’s one-party state has turned itself into a clone of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the CCP with the guardians of the revolution, like the mullahs or the Party politburo, being the cabal of labor mandarins who were empowered by the very same state government that they now dominate. For the worker bees, they mostly approve of this arrangement so long as the pipeline of bennies keeps flowing, a glaring example of stage one thinking.
“Most thinking stops at stage one.” — Thomas Sowell in Applied Economics
Thomas Sowell
Stage-one thinking? Sowell defines stage one as a myopic concern with only the immediate consequence of a proposal or action. Then a sharper mind, in response, forces the person to address, “Then what?” After a series of then-whats, the person quickly realizes that their great idea is buffoonery. But don’t expect much stage two or three among most of those without a BA, and many of those walking around with one. According to a Pew survey from 2019, those with less than a college degree are four-and-a-half times more likely to view our participation in the global economy as a bad thing (see #1 and #2 below). Blue collar support for a wide range of foreign engagements has been waning for years. But then what, after the tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine?
You see, a stage-one buzzword of the Left has entered the lexicon of the Right: industrial policy, which basically translates into raising the economic drawbridge in international trade. It parallels Lenin’s infamous “central planning”. In central planning, the government manages, or directs, the economy to mold the “better society”. Whose better society? Of course, it’s the one in the mind of those perpetual obsessives who’ve spent their adult lives in fevered hatred of the existing patterns of life. The mental pathology infects the Left, and now the virus has come to the Right.
The scheme runs four-square into Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Their end state of bliss – America First – demands great power in the form of more government interventions to direct the lives of millions of economic actors acting both as buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, taxpayers and beneficiaries, in the whole range of possible economic activities available to each one of these participants. Such knowledge and wisdom are beyond human capacity, let alone the people manning the controls of the massive administrative state, the Fed, congressional committee staff, local planning commissions and boards of supervisors, a state’s Dept. of Fish and Game, Coastal Commissions, or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the people who’ll enforce Trump’s tariffs. It’s a fool’s errand, but one, today, the Right seems anxious to pursue. Read J.D. Vance’s or Donald Trump’s speeches.
The people who don’t like you driving a Toyota are the same people who see no reason for NATO, an independent Ukraine, protecting Taiwan and its Taiwan Semiconductor, or preventing the oil-rich Middle East from becoming the playground of the mullahs. For stage-one thinkers, anything beyond our borders places an out-of-sight second to the extortionate goodies made possible by a cozy relationship with accommodating politicians. Don’t expect stage-one thinkers to have a grasp of the world war stage-setting in the 1938 Munich Agreement. Aggression was rewarded and soon we were embroiled in a total war of 80 million deaths, civilian and military.
Scene from the Battle for Iwo Jima, Feb.-March 1945
We could have stayed out as the first edition of America First in 1940 demanded. It took a brazen surprise attack to shock stage-one thinkers into realizing that events an ocean away can lead to Americans dying in large numbers.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” — G. Michael Hopf in his novel Those Who Remain
Though, are we the same kind of people who could tolerate the bloody storming of the beaches of Iwo Jima and D-Day’s Omaha, or show persistence in the horrid conditions of Okinawa, the Hürtgen Forest, or the Battle of the Bulge? One has to wonder. Our elections are a barometer of the public psyche. Look at the pitches, now from both sides. Our elections are looting expeditions. Republicans promise not to touch our bankrupting entitlements while delivering on all manner of goodies to the middle class and blue collars. Ditto for the donkey party, only by a factor of ten. It’s all billed as fair-share justice when in reality it’s just targeting the successful to bankroll their pet social engineering schemes. Being spoon fed from the public treasury isn’t a promising approach in preserving a hardy people.
The Democrats used to be the party of government command and control. Not any longer. The Republicans offer a similar farce.
Think about it. What’ll happen in this command economy of the Right is a replay of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) signed by Reagan. We got the amnesty but little of the other component: enforcement. Trump will get his tariffs – something the Democrats are already giddy about – but won’t get much regulatory relief, the very thing that makes us uncompetitive with the rest of the world. The blue-collar suck-up in the form of compulsory unionization also awaits. We might get some reprieve from the greenie totalitarianism, but NIMBYism remains a populist obsession. Republicans have no stomach to fight hikes in the minimum wage, nor the other humungous host of mandates that raise the cost of doing business in the U.S. The tariff wall goes up and we will wallow in our own petri dish of fiscal and regulatory incontinence.
Prices will rise, and we may not even notice it. Higher prices only become apparent if there is a point of comparison. Where’s the comparison after walling off the competition? However, we will see an economy frozen in amber, limping along, with accountability and the essential force of creative destruction limited to those smaller firms without an intimate relationship with powerful politicos. The big government of the command economy necessitates big business. Big government and big business are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
Welcome to the cesspool of the blue-collar command economy and an electoral choice between detestables. That’s our choice this time around in the presidential sweepstakes: a California totalitarian with a velvet glove or a self-absorbed panderer. Oh, the panderer is “tough”, but only tough on foreigners and not to some within his own ranks who unwittingly demand undeserved and extortionate privileges. Which one of the offerings do you dislike the most?
For me, I’ll put on the hazmat suit and vote for the bombastic panderer. Somehow, a cultural revolution of porn to grade schoolers, teenage genital mutilation, XY “girls” everywhere in women’s spaces, eat the rich, carte blanche abortion inclusive of pedicide (killing of children), and greenie totalitarianism seems to be more Orwellian than the tariff buffoonery and blue-collar suck-up. There, I made my choice.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “6. Views of foreign policy”, Pew Research Center, 12/19/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/6-views-of-foreign-policy/
2. “Majority of Americans take a dim view of increased trade with other countries”, Pew Research Center, 7/29/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.
The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.
It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.
The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.
A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.
Rick Santorum
It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.
And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?
How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.
Robert Lighthizer
Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.
Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.
For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.
The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.
As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930
Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.
Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.
One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.
The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.
Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.
Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.
PLA Navy on maneuvers 2022
Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.
RogerG
Sources:
*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html
