Monthly Archives: March 2018

And the news is that this is not news

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I’m with marcus on taking a hard approach to dealing with the left. I just came across this, which is a report in an obscure journal about a statement made by the President of the United States, via twitter, that no one else seems to have mentioned, so far as I can tell: Obama’s work to discredit the Trump campaign was ‘bigger than Watergate,’ Trump tweets. This is literally true, and where is anyone else to make this into a story?

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Why did the Obama Administration start an investigation into the Trump Campaign (with zero proof of wrongdoing) long before the Election in November? Wanted to discredit so Crooked H would win. Unprecedented. Bigger than Watergate! Plus, Obama did NOTHING about Russian meddling.

5:22 AM – 5 Mar 2018

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That the story is also anti-Trump in tone and content is almost by the way. Meanwhile those who should bless the day he became president agonise over putting tariffs on steel and aluminium.

Trump and trade

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An introductory text on economic theory won’t get you very far in trying to make sense of what is going on in international trade. Here, therefore, are two bits of background on PDT’s policies on trade. The first via Conservative Treehouse:

Clearly, nobody was paying attention when Commerce Secretary Ross laid out at the Davos World Economic Forum exactly what the administration was intending to do in the coming months:

1. POTUS Trump is delivering an awakening to a generation who have never known trade policy as applied to a balanced U.S. economy.

2. America-First is a nationalistic approach to U.S. economic and trade policy that seeks to protect and elevate the standard of living for U.S. workers and specifically the American middle-class. Obviously the application of “economic nationalism” is adverse to the interests of multinational corporations who have been purchasing U.S. policy through DC politicians for decades with the last 30+ years seeing exceptionally high increases.

3. Both Democrats and Republicans have been selling out Main Street interests in favour of the financial interests of multinationals on Wall Street. The results have been exported jobs and manufacturing.

4. Resetting the economics to restore a thriving middle-class requires reversing policy and re-establishing priorities. Government cannot force investment and economic policy can only create the conditions for investment.

5. Creating the conditions for investment inside the U.S. means shifting policies that previously made investment outside the U.S. the “best play.” That’s where tax policy, trade policy, tariffs and renegotiated trade deals drive the action.

6. Trump assembled a specific set of economic policies to reverse the 30 year exfiltration of American wealth. Each policy move is connected to the prior policy move. Each initiative builds on the preceding initiative. Each current sequential step is established to deconstruct a historic policy step that might be decades old.

7. Opposition to America-First economic policy is from those who benefited from the prior policies, i.e., multinational corporations, multinational financials, Wall Street, purchased politicians and corporate media.

8. The implementation of the policy requires two elements: Tax and Trade. Inside the Trump administration there are economic policy advocates who agree on the tax element but disagree on the trade element. The combined Trump policy is part of the larger America-First initiative. The Wall Street crowd align with Trump on taxes but split with him on trade

9. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is critical as he is the person creating the fulcrum in the balanced economy reset. Trump and Secretary Ross always knew they would need to jettison part of the administrations’ economic team once they accomplished and moved past tax reform. Their focus is now laser targeted policy toward Main Street.

10. This is phase #2 of the total policy execution. During a panel discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum, Secretary Ross outlined how the ‘America First’ economic policy and phase-2 platform engages with the global community, conveying to the larger multinational interests an explanation of the high-level shift in U.S. trade policy and reinforcing the Trump Doctrine of economic nationalism. He said: “The Chinese for quite a little while have been superb at free-trade rhetoric and even more superb at highly protectionist behaviour. Every time the U.S. does anything to deal with a problem we are called protectionist.” Cue the audio visual demonstrations over the past few days surrounding Steel and Aluminium tariffs.

11. At Davos, after three decades of Trump outlining his trade views, Secretary Ross also said President Trump has a forceful leadership style that some people don’t like but “While we don’t intend to abrogate leadership, leadership is different from being a sucker and being a patsy. We would like to be the leader in making the world trade system more fair and equitable to all participants.” He challenged all the panelists, including World Trade Organization Director-General Roberto Azevedo and Cargill Inc. CEO David MacLennan, to name a nation less protectionist than the U.S. He got no responses.

12. Secretary Ross then cited a study of more than 20 products that showed China had higher tariffs on all but two of the items on the list while Europe had higher tariffs on all but four. The panel sat agape at Ross’s delivery of irrefutable facts to the audience.

13. “Before we get into sticks and stones about free trade we ought first talk about whether there really is free trade or is it a unicorn in the garden,” said Ross. Again, there was no response from the panel. The Corporate and Financial media never reported on the severity of what Ross said at Davos – because the Main Street policy he was explaining is so directly against their interests.

14. Despite the tariffs Trump imposed in January on solar panels and washing machines and despite the proposition of Steel and Aluminum tariffs, according to their own Commerce Ministry, China is hoping for a “bumper year” for new trade deals.

15. For the past 30+ years, DC politicians have been selling out the U.S. economy to corporate interests, Wall Street and multinationals. POTUS Trump is simply saying “no more.” They hate him for it but he doesn’t care.

And then there is this from Forbes: China Is Not A Market Economy, And The WTO Won’t Survive Recognizing It As Such.

China’s status as a “market economy” is once again under dispute. Not, of course, by anyone who knows anything about the Chinese economy, but within the councils of the WTO, where the issue is being argued between the European Union and China. The U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has notified the body that the U.S. also — in support of the EU’s case — opposes China’s recognition as a market economy.

China has reacted with predictable hostility, restating its longstanding view that market economy status would simply become a fact on the 15th anniversary of joining the WTO, almost exactly a year ago, when China first filed a complaint at the WTO about the refusal of the U.S. and the EU to grant this recognition. According to a strict reading of their accession treaty, they have at least an argument. In this agreement, a 15-year period was assumed to be enough time for China to implement its many provisions and emerge, more or less, as a functioning market economy. Had China made faster progress, they could have made their case and been granted this status earlier, according to the agreement.

There’s more after that, all worth reading to the end. And then there’s this.

“The greatest asset of our whole economic system is its effect upon commerce, agriculture, industry, the wage earner, and the farmer, and practically all our producers and distributors, is our incomparable home market. It has always been a fundamental principle of the Republican Party that this market should be reserved in the first instance for the consumption of our domestic products…Our only defense against the cheap production, low wages and low standard of living which exist abroad, and our only method of maintaining our own standards, is through a protective tariff. We need protection as a national policy, to be applied wherever it is required.” — Calvin Coolidge.

Biblical morality

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She means more than just this, but in the world as it is, she cannot come right out and say it. Instead, she begins like this, as captured in the heading to the article: Understanding of the bible helps us decode western culture.

There has been some discussion lately about whether knowledge of religion, especially the Bible, is important. A founder of the Bible Literacy Project has recommended that all children study the Bible. He says: “If you don’t have knowledge of the Bible you can’t understand literature, history, art, music or culture fully … you’re not getting a full education.”

He is right. Our way of life is steeped in Judeo-Christian culture. We cannot decode Western culture without the Bible and some knowledge of religion.

What she actually means she saves to the end:

The anti-religionists demand that children just learn ethics, but from where do they assume these ethics spring? The most important thing about the biblical texts is that within the great biblical stories, youngsters learn our foundational ethical principles. Those first principles of ethical behaviour are contained in the Ten Commandments. To get to the Commandments we need to know the story of Moses, then the story of the Jews and, last, Jesus’ life and new teachings.

Many of the rather superficial, and destructive ideological fights that commentators are so keen on wouldn’t happen if they knew more about our cultural history and had more respect for the depth of our Judeo-Christian inheritance.

These precepts have governed our lives, our social organisation and our law for centuries, and are still valid. Whether we know it or not, they exist in our consciousness and ignoring them leads to confusion and chaos because as even the fashionable new agnostic guru Jordan Peterson admits, God didn’t give us the 10 suggestions, he gave us the Ten Commandments.

The only thing she gets wrong here is her assumption that Jordan Peterson doesn’t agree with her. Peterson on the existence of God.

And on atheism.

Beyond Economics 101

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This post on Economics 101 reminds me yet again how useless modern economic theory is at working through almost any economic issue at all. It’s about the theory of comparative advantage, I think, and the role of free trade in creating a high standard of living. But let me go first to this question at Quora: What are 25 economics books that you would recommend (preferably classical and neoclassical)? My answer:

If you are seriously interested in understanding economics you need to understand classical economic theory, the economics of the period from the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 until the marginal revolution began about a hundred years later in the 1870s. And if you are interested in understanding classical economic theory, you should read the third edition of my own Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader.

Modern economic theory has fallen into very hard times since its classical period, and is now incapable of explaining almost anything that matters. My FME third edition is entirely supply-side, explaining how classical economists understood the operation of an economy which is how an economy actually does work.

From the marginal revolution with its focus on marginal utility, through to the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s with its introduction of aggregate demand, economic theory has looked at economies from the demand side. And while it has a superficial appeal, no economy is driven by demand. All economies are driven from its production side. People buy more where more is produced. If you want to understand what allows people to demand, you first have to understand what makes them capable of producing.

I will just add that if you try to read classical theory without some preparation for the changes in the terminology between economics today and economics then, you will miss the point. This is a paper you can find at SSRN which will help you get past what is a quite formidable barrier.

Classical Economics Explained: Understanding Economic Theory Before Keynes

Steven Kates

Abstract

Since the publication of The General Theory, pre-Keynesian economics has been labelled “classical,” but what that classical economics actually consisted of is now virtually an unknown. There is, instead, a straw-man caricature most economists absorb through a form of academic osmosis but which is never specifically taught, not even as part of a course in the history of economics. The paper outlines the crucial features that differentiate modern macroeconomics from classical theory, with the emphasis on what an economist would have understood as The General Theory was being published. Based on the differences outlined, a model of classical economic theory is presented which explains how pre-Keynesian economists understood the operation of the economy, the causes of recession and why a public-spending stimulus was universally rejected by mainstream economists before 1936. The classical model presented is an amalgam of the final edition of John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy published in his lifetime and Henry Clay’s influential 1916 Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader, a text which was itself built from the economics of Mill.

Here’s the link to the paper.

Classical Economics Explained: Understanding Economic Theory Before Keynes

As for comparative advantage and free trade, if you’d like a very good explanation of its classical meaning, you won’t do better than my Free Market Economics, an analysis I have not changed a word of since the first edition. It is naturally taken from the economics of John Stuart Mill who had himself taken it from David Ricardo, who wrote it up in 1817. It’s a great first approximation for all those economic types who are actually addicted to mercantilism, whereby economies are driven from the demand side and economies grow by increasing their level of exports. I know, who could believe such a thing, but let us assume just for now that there really are morons who harbour such views. How did Mill and Ricardo explain what was wrong with such notions? By pointing out that the best way to improve one’s standard of living is to produce what one does best and exchange one’s own forms of supply for the goods and services produced by others. You know, goods buy goods. You know, Say’s Law. You know? Perhaps not.

But you know what was also current then? The gold standard. There are many ways this process of comparative advantage breaks down, but with the abandonment of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates, there are all kinds of ways to cheat in foreign trade relations that are not discussed as part of the basic theory. This is the definition of “currency manipulation” found at Google:

It occurs when a government or central bank buys or sells foreign currency in exchange for their own domestic currency, generally with the intention of influencing the exchange rate and trade policy outcomes.

“Influencing” as in making one’s own situation better at the expense of someone else. It can be done, and is done. And there’s more. For most economies, a devaluation occurs naturally with deficits but not with the $US which is the world’s reserve currency. And let me also add this, that there is no trade war imaginable unless others decide to retaliate. And why would they if the only damage of increased tariffs in the US is to its own economy? Let the US suffer for its actions, right? Why poke yourself in the eye if they want to poke themselves in the eye?

There is so much more that can be said but will leave it to some other time.

Only one book written in the twenty-first century will explain the classical economics of the nineteenth

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At Quora, this question: What are 25 economics books that you would recommend (preferably classical and neoclassical)? My answer:

If you are seriously interested in understanding economics you need to understand classical economic theory, the economics of the period from the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 until the marginal revolution began about a hundred years later in the 1870s. And if you are interested in understanding classical economic theory, you should read the third edition of my own Free Market Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader.

Modern economic theory has fallen into very hard times since its classical period, and is now incapable of explaining almost anything that matters. My FME third edition is entirely supply-side, explaining how classical economists understood the operation of an economy which is how an economy actually does work.

From the marginal revolution with its focus on marginal utility, through to the Keynesian Revolution of the 1930s with its introduction of aggregate demand, economic theory has looked at economies from the demand side. And while it has a superficial appeal, no economy is driven by demand. All economies are driven from its production side. People buy more where more is produced. If you want to understand what allows people to demand, you first have to understand what makes them capable of producing.

I will just add that if you try to read classical theory without some preparation for the changes in the terminology between economics today and economics then, you will miss the point. This is a paper you can find at SSRN which will help you get past what is a quite formidable barrier.

Classical Economics Explained: Understanding Economic Theory Before Keynes

Steven Kates

Abstract

Since the publication of The General Theory, pre-Keynesian economics has been labelled “classical,” but what that classical economics actually consisted of is now virtually an unknown. There is, instead, a straw-man caricature most economists absorb through a form of academic osmosis but which is never specifically taught, not even as part of a course in the history of economics. The paper outlines the crucial features that differentiate modern macroeconomics from classical theory, with the emphasis on what an economist would have understood as The General Theory was being published. Based on the differences outlined, a model of classical economic theory is presented which explains how pre-Keynesian economists understood the operation of the economy, the causes of recession and why a public-spending stimulus was universally rejected by mainstream economists before 1936. The classical model presented is an amalgam of the final edition of John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Political Economy published in his lifetime and Henry Clay’s influential 1916 Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader, a text which was itself built from the economics of Mill.

Here’s the link to the paper.

Classical Economics Explained: Understanding Economic Theory Before Keynes

Providing moral perspective

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A letter I’ve just sent.

I picked up a copy of The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches and came across the Wheeling WV speech by Joe McCarthy which seemed so up to the minute that I immediately wrote this post: Where’s Joe McCarthy when you need him?

I have in the last couple of weeks or so read three things that have really brought our current moral predicaments further into the light for me. The first one was a 1913 biography written by John Jay Chapman, someone I had never heard of until about a month ago, writing on William Lloyd Garrison, who derived his entire will to overcome slavery through his Christian faith. And then I came across a book published in 1944 titled The Ten Commandments which were ten short novels in which ten famous authors of the time each wrote a story on one of the commandments. Clear in every page how important Christian thought was in providing the moral perspective in the fight against the Nazis. And then there was McCarthy himself who based what he did and said on the perspective provided for him in Christian thought.

But in discussing all this with others, a few things came to light to make me see how much has changed that make what McCarthy said as recently as the 1950s almost a dead letter today. First, everyone I know is an atheist. That I think of the world as we know it as designed but without any real notion of who the designer was or for what purpose, but almost with certainty not the random outcome of molecular collision, makes me well outside the norms of our modern mis-educated elites, but still not a Christian in any traditional sense. Therefore, the distinction between Christianity and “atheistic” communism is something almost no one I would discuss these things with would understand. I think the absence of Christian morality makes someone in today’s world a leaf in the wind but so what? They don’t think they are and who is anyone else to say they are? Then, as Garrison emphasised himself, slave owners were Christian and used the Bible as the basis to justify what they did. Beyond that, with Islam on the other side of the ledger, however else we might describe them, they are not “atheists” in any sense of the word. They are at war with the Christian world, but which aspect of the Christian world unifies us on our side? And then where is the word that can replace communism? The Soviets completely discredited “communism” but have hardly lain a finger on “socialism”, even though the second “S” in USSR was “Socialist”. It is clear that the anti-Christian left are now teaming up with Islam in one final onslaught against what remains of Christian morality, but few among our elites will defend what passes for morality today as “Christian”, even though that is what it is even if they don’t know or understand it. As I am told, you don’t have to believe in God to be a good person – just look at me, they say, and of course they are right. But then I look at others, and am not as sure as I was.

Meanwhile, the editor of the 20th Century Speeches volume summary begins, “The smear tactics of McCarthy and his philistine contempt for intellectuals …”, and on my blog, even though I don’t publish comments I do get them, and the first one was, “even a stopped watch is right twice a day”. The real difficulty is to know where and how to get a secure footing today in dealing with moral questions. I put this post up a week ago about looking for a book of Bible stories for my granddaughter, but while the Bible as literature is important, the Bible as morality is more important. And now it may all soon be gone.

And then there’s this – “9 charts that prove there’s never been a better time to be alive”

The charts demonstrate that the creativity of our Western civilisation is bringing a new prosperity to the entire planet, but whether it is bringing contentment is a different story altogether. And then, by coincidence, I came across this just today, in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, p66:

What Gladstone said, commenting on the increase in national wealth, was: ‘I should look almost with apprehension and with pain upon this intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power if it were my belief that it was confined to the class who are in easy circumstances…. The average condition of the British labourer, we have the happiness to know, has improved during the last twenty years in a degree which we know to be extraordinary, and which we may almost pronounce to be unexampled in in the history of any country and of any age.’

Whether this is the best time ever to have been alive, I do not know, but it is certainly our time. Hope you are making the best of it.

Where’s Joe McCarthy when you need him?

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You cannot, of course, find a copy of Joe McCarthy’s speeches in any context other than negative, except perhaps here or in the writings of Diana West and M. Stanton Evans. Other than a few additions just to bring things up to the moment, these are McCarthy’s own words, even truer and more terrifying today than when they were first stated because the enemy is now almost entirely within the gates.

Speech of Joseph McCarthy, Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the one hundred forty-first two hundred and ninth birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world. As we celebrate the birth of this man who with his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be able to speak of peace in our time—of war being outlawed—and of world-wide disarmament. These would be truly appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Five years after a world war has been won, men’s hearts should anticipate a long peace—and men’s minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a period—for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of “the cold war.” This is a time when all the world is split into two three, perhaps four, vast, increasingly hostile armed camps — a time of a great armament race.

Today we can almost physically hear the mutterings and rumblings of an invigorated god of war. You can see it, feel it, and hear it all the way from the Indochina hills, from the shores of Formosa Taiwan, right over into the very heart of Europe itself.

The one encouraging thing is that the “mad moment” has not yet arrived for the firing of the gun or the exploding of the bomb which will set civilization about the final task of destroying itself. There is still a hope for peace if we finally decide that no longer can we safely blind our eyes and close our ears to those facts which are shaping up more and more clearly . . . and that is that we are now engaged in a show-down fight . . . not the usual war between nations for land areas or other material gains, but a war between two diametrically opposed ideologies.

The great difference between our western Christian world the atheistic Communist world and those who are our enemies is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous.

Stalin’s resolute putting across of these two ideas, of course, did much to divide the world. With only these differences, however, the east and the west could most certainly still live in peace.

The real, basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralism . . . invented by Marx, preached feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin. This religion of immoralism, if the Red half of the world triumphs — and well it may, gentlemen — this religion of immoralism will more deeply wound and damage mankind than any conceivable economic or political system.

Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin have added in clear-cut, unmistakable language their resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a god, can exist side by side with their communistic state.

Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity or morality. He called this “soulful ravings” and “sloppy sentimentality.” . . .

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down.

Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen, let us go directly to the leader of communism today—Joseph Stalin. Here is what he said—not back in 1928, not before the war, not during the war — but 2 years after the last war was ended: “To think that the Communist revolution can be carried out peacefully, within the framework of a Christian democracy, means one has either gone out of one’s mind and lost all normal understanding, or has grossly and openly repudiated the Communist revolution.” . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there by anyone who fails to realize that the Communist world has said the time is now? . . . that this is the time for the show-down between the democratic Christian world and the communistic atheistic [and anti-Christian] world?

Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long.

…

As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” . . .

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has enemies have sent men to invade our shores . . . but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer . . . the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.

This is glaringly true in the State Department [along with, today, the FBI, and Department of Justice and who knows where else?]. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous. . . .

I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. . . .

As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes — being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust — high treason. . . .

He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of honesty and decency in government.

Two days later, McCarthy spoke again. It is impossible to adjust the words because the rot has been so deep and the anti-freedom party has grown so large. You will see the point unless it is your desire not to.

Joseph McCarthy, addressing President Harry Truman, February 11, 1950

In the Lincoln Day speech at Wheeling Thursday night I stated that the State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers who are helping to shape our foreign policy. I further stated that I have in my possession the names of 57 Communists who are in the State Department at present. A State Department spokesman promptly denied this, claiming that there is not a single Communist in the Department. You can convince yourself of the falsity of the State Department claim very easily. You will recall that you personally appointed a board to screen State Department employees for the purpose of weeding out fellow travelers—men whom the board considered dangerous to the security of this Nation. Your board did a painstaking job, and named hundreds which had been listed as dangerous to the security of the Nation, because of communistic connections.

While the records are not available to me, I know absolutely of one group of approximately 300 certified to the Secretary for discharge because of communism. He actually only discharged approximately 80. I understand that this was done after lengthy consultation with the now-convicted traitor, Alger Hiss. I would suggest, therefore, Mr. President, that you simply pick up your phone and ask Mr. Acheson how many of those whom your board had labeled as dangerous Communists he failed to discharge. The day the House Un-American Activities Committee exposed Alger Hiss as an important link in an international Communist spy ring you signed an order forbidding the State Department’s giving any information in regard to the disloyalty or the communistic connections of anyone in that Department to the Congress.

Despite this State Department black-out, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department. This list is available to you but you can get a much longer list by ordering Secretary Acheson to give you a list of those whom your own board listed as being disloyal and who are still working in the State Department. I believe the following is the minimum which can be expected of you in this case.

1. That you demand that Acheson give you and the proper congressional committee the names and a complete report on all of those who were placed in the Department by Alger Hiss, and all of those still working in the State Department who were listed by your board as bad security risks because of their communistic connections.

2. That you promptly revoke the order in which you provided under no circumstances could a congressional committee obtain any information or help in exposing Communists.

Failure on your part will label the Democratic Party of being the bedfellow of international communism. Certainly this label is not deserved by the hundreds of thousands of loyal American Democrats throughout the Nation, and by the sizable number of able loyal Democrats in both the Senate and the House.

That was then. Today it is a conspiracy so vast it is almost impossible to fathom its extent. The Democratic Party, the Greens, the left in general, the media, the “entertainment” industry, the academic world and even big business who are, as ever, too short-sighted to understand a thing other than the bottom line, are now almost beyond reach. Other than the American president, who is there in a position of authority and power who can be the counterweight to the fantastic array of enemies our freedoms and our way of life now face?

Protection for Republican majorities in the House and Senate

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I am a free trader by nature but not a big fan of economic forms of self-harm. And I am certainly for Trump basing his decisions on political calculation, since I am also against political forms of self harm. PDT is shifting towards a slight increase in protection for American products, as summed up in this article from The Wall Street Journal: ‘Every day is a new adventure’: Trump upends Washington and Wall Street with shifts on trade, guns. Pulling the various bits from the article, there are two sides to it, always bearing in mind that if it’s in the WSJ the story will be shaped by a free-trade ethos. So why, according to the story, would protection levels be increased. This is part of the Trump calculation:

  • foreign countries are stealing American jobs with cheap imports – tariffs are one of the only ways to punish other countries for practices that disadvantage U.S. manufacturers
  • impose tariffs on steel and aluminum in the name of national security – large amounts of cheap steel and aluminum posed a national security risk for the United States
  • Trump has also been keeping a close eye on the special election this month for a U.S. House seat in western Pennsylvania. Voters in places such as Pennsylvania’s 18th District are looking for more to be done by the administration. The president has noted that the Republican in the race is struggling in a district where he won by a large margin.

And why leave things alone. Again from the WSJ and part of the White House debate:

  • tariffs could spark a trade war – other countries would retaliate, imposing tariffs on U.S. exports, damaging an economy that Trump was trying to build up through his tax cuts
  • the stock market was doing well [as is the economy as a whole].

This is hardly a return to Smoot-Hawley, and if it protects Republican majorities in the House and Senate, the small ripple effects on the American and world economies will be worth the extra few cents Americans pay for the goods and services they buy. Meanwhile, this is the stated threat from Europe:

“We will put tariffs on Harley-Davidson, on bourbon and on blue jeans – Levi’s,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told German television.

Meanwhile public spending rises another trillion and no one says a word.

The greatest woman of the twentieth century

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In reviewing The Iron Lady I made the offhand comment that Margaret Thatcher had been the Greatest Woman of the Twentieth Century. The debate over the greatest man had taken place at the end of 1999 and the choices, at least in the English speaking world, were narrowed down to Sir Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although there was some debate over which may have been the greater of the two, there did seem to be a distance between them and whoever might have been third.

Oddly, however, there was no one chosen as the Greatest Woman, and I suspect it is because there was no one who stood out to the same extent as Margaret Thatcher. She was clearly so far ahead of the rest that even to raise the question shows how much she stood out from all other possible choices. Whether you loved her, hated her or were merely indifferent, she along with Ronald Reagan, dominated the events of her time. But because she is a woman of the right, a classical liberal in the conservative tradition, those who typically hand out such laurels refused to raise the subject so that they could avoid even having to acknowledge how significant her role had been.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a Britain devastated by industrial mayhem following the Winter of Discontent and within half a decade returned sound governance to the UK. She endured the full impact of the miners’s strikes and restored industrial relations sanity by sheer force of will. She took on and prevailed against Argentina in the War in the Falklands. She strode like a colossus during the Cold War which she, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, were instrumental in bringing to a peaceful end through an unbending moral crusade against political evil. She demanded fiscal and monetary disciplines that ended the economic chaos of the 1970s. She drove privatisation and defended our entrepreneurially-driven system of free enterprise. She was a model for others to follow as many have done. She remains to this day the gold standard of a conviction politician on the right side of history. If being a force for good is what matters, Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly the greatest woman of the twentieth century.

In reviewing The Iron Lady I made the offhand comment that Margaret Thatcher had been the Greatest Woman of the Twentieth Century. The debate over the greatest man had taken place at the end of 1999 and the choices, at least in the English speaking world, were narrowed down to Sir Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Although there was some debate over which may have been the greater of the two, there did seem to be a distance between them and whoever might have been third.

Oddly, however, there was no one chosen as the Greatest Woman, and I suspect it is because there was no one who stood out to the same extent as Margaret Thatcher. She was clearly so far ahead of the rest that even to raise the question shows how much she stood out from all other possible choices. Whether you loved her, hated her or were merely indifferent, she along with Ronald Reagan, dominated the events of her time. But because she is a woman of the right, a classical liberal in the conservative tradition, those who typically hand out such laurels refused to raise the subject so that they could avoid even having to acknowledge how significant her role had been.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a Britain devastated by industrial mayhem following the Winter of Discontent and within half a decade returned sound governance to the UK. She endured the full impact of the miners’s strikes and restored industrial relations sanity by sheer force of will. She took on and prevailed against Argentina in the War in the Falklands. She strode like a colossus during the Cold War which she, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, were instrumental in bringing to a peaceful end through an unbending moral crusade against political evil. She demanded fiscal and monetary disciplines that ended the economic chaos of the 1970s. She drove privatisation and defended our entrepreneurially-driven system of free enterprise. She was a model for others to follow as many have done. She remains to this day the gold standard of a conviction politician on the right side of history. If being a force for good is what matters, Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly the greatest woman of the twentieth century.

 

Reprinted from January 20, 2012 which I was reminded about in writing the previous post on Winston Churchill.