Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Blue Yeti ·
April 25, 2012 at 9:13pm
This week on Uncommon Knowledge, author and commentator Pat Buchanan discusses the disintegration of the United States as a superpower, immigration, ObamaCare and religion, and what really happened at MSNBC.
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Feb '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Part 3, in which he argues for "economic patriotism" burned what little sympathy I had for him. He simply does not believe in capitalism. Free trade makes everyone richer, including, eventually, the American who loses the manufacturing job. That I don't know with certainty in what sector of the economy that worker will land doesn't weaken my point. He's a very erudite version of Huckabee -- socially conservative, economically protectionist. The worst of all possible worlds for those who value small government.
Feb '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Oh, and Peter, many thanks for pushing him as hard as you did on the free trade questions. It really forced him to clarify his positions. I would much rather be on the side of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. Nothing he said about it was persuasive, and I believe much of it has already been debunked over a century ago by the likes of Adam Smith and Frédéric Bastiat.
Thank goodness for Ricochet! Where else could I defend free trade against Pat Buchanan?
Jul '10
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I agree with Doctor Bean. I found segment 3 difficult to watch because I kept wanting to grab Buchanan through the monitor and shake him to bring him to his senses.
Mar '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I agree with much of what he says... I'm not convinced either way on the free trade question right now. The Founders were against free trade, and I hold them in higher esteem than anyone in power right now.
But my number one qualm... hell, I'll be honest, my outright disgust and amazement... is from his attitude towards Israel. It is simply horrible. Iran is a "rational" regime? Israel is an "existential threat"? That's a combination of willful blindness and outright loathing for the Jewish state.
Mar '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
It might be noted that John Derbyshire has joined Buchanan on the protectionist side of the aisle, largely on the strength of Ian Fletcher's book Free Trade Doesn't Work, previewed here.
May '10
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I agree with Pat on free trade. The economic argument, or the dollars and cents of the thing, is complicated. Sure, one might argue that a global economy lowers the price of products in America, but that all depends. If the American economy is truly competitive, largely unhampered by monopoly-creating regulation, then the price of goods should be low anyway.
The main and best argument against global free trade, though, emphasizes cultural loss. As Buchanan noted, there will always be some people who are better at things practical than things intellectual. That isn't the result of bad education merely; it's how humans were created--with a wealth of diverse strengths and weaknesses. You are crippling a whole segment of your population, a large segment of your population rather, when you blithely assume your nation will do just fine taking on all the white collar jobs of the world.
We are not, nor ever will be, a nation consisting only of scholars and scientists. Even if such a country did exist, I would pity its uniform dullness.
Edited on April 25, 2012 at 11:23pmOct '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I also have a very hard time listening to him about Israel.
Mar '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Peter, Peter, Peter!!! You were SO close to painting him into a corner on the free trade discussion. What you should have pointed out to him in the tennis shoe discussion was that if the company moved its manufacturing back to the USA, wouldn't they be making less per pair if they continued to charge $150?
And then, wouldn't the price of the shoes rise? Or, even worse, what if the company decided it couldn't charge more given the competition? What if its decrease in profits made it decide to get out of the shoe biz altogether? So, not only would the workers overseas lose their jobs from the manufacturing moving back to the USA, but the salesmen and truck drivers and rubber makers, etc. would lose biz because the company went out of business, period?
See, my gut tells me that confronted with this scenario, Pat would eventually attack greedy businessmen and may even start to argue for some sort of price controls like his mentor Nixon pushed.
The moral of the story: Protectionism causes all the businesses not involved in it to subsidize the ones that are involved in it.
Mar '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Oh yeah, I agree with the other posts: He sucks on Israel.
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Well I'm no foreign policy wonk, but what's wrong with saying America's interests are above those of the Israelis?
Apr '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I can't stand Pat's Balkanization theories. He is simply propagating the same kind of fears that people had about the Polish, Italians, Irish, and Japanese. The US is still the best country at integrating people on Earth. I think he has entirely miss read the history of the United States on this issue.
Apr '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Douglas: I agree with much of what he says... I'm not convinced either way on the free trade question right now. The Founders were against free trade, and I hold them in higher esteem than anyone in power right now.
But my number one qualm... hell, I'll be honest, my outright disgust and amazement... is from his attitude towards Israel. It is simply horrible. Iran is a "rational" regime? Israel is an "existential threat"? That's a combination of willful blindness and outright loathing for the Jewish state. · 4 hours ago
The founders included some who were against free trade, but Jefferson and other anti-tariff Founders existed.
It's also important to note that they were writing before the serious proofs of free trade had been written. It's like people who say that Adam Smith was dumb because he used a labor theory of value or, worse, suggest that we should likewise adopt it. I don't know if Hamilton would have been a free trader if he'd been able to read Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Bastiat, but no one else does, either.
Apr '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I think that this is part of what makes UK so wonderful; Peter doesn't try to demolish views, merely to clarify them. Interviewees can trust him, so they take the rope to hang themselves. This was an excellent example; all right thinking people (tm) will have walked away from this with their views that Pat Buchanan has terrible views on a range of subjects confirmed. I know I did.
People who agree with those awful views will have their views similarly confirmed, assuming they already knew more or less what to expect.
The value is not in the broad brushstrokes, which are unlikely to persuade the already informed, but in the details of Buchanan's thought. Peter gets interviewees to explain their views clearly partly by refraining from aggressive assault.
As an aside, his one Ricochet outburst at Mike Murphy remains the only exception I've seen, but it's enough for me to agree with Romney's absence from Ricochet and Uncommon Knowledge.
Nov '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
Although I almost always consider myself to be a free-trader, this view of mine may be primarily linked to my complete disgust with big governments and various constant manipulations of the market by governmental powers. I think free trade favors the large number of buyers over the small number of manufacturers.
However, Buchanan did get me to re-think one thing. People who always claim that they do not want a trade war seem to fail to understand that we are never going to have a type of utopian trade peace. I think Buchanan is correct in implying that economic matters are always a constant battle. As someone who has always been self-employed I understand this. I have to renegotiate my salary every day. I'm not sure that trade barriers that target hostile or semi-hostile countries should be as disagreeable as barriers that target one product such as foreign automobiles or steel which are just political exercises to buy the votes in certain Rust Belt swing states.
On the other hand, nations that trade together rarely engage in battle. Supporting a MFN status for repressive Chinese dictators? It was one tool we had against them.
Nov '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I do remember when NAFTA was being proposed that many conservatives said that one of the reasons that it was needed was to slow down immigration from Mexico. I'm not sure whether I believed that myself. I think I actually did, but I have never lived or even visiting any part of the United States close to the Mexico border, so what do I know.
I generally supported free trade with Mexico, but I remember thinking that the NAFTA treaty which I think is about 700-1,700 pages, depending on the footnote and explanation page count, was almost as silly as the about 2700 pages of today's Obamacare. At that rate in another 10 years the next big political document will be 10,000 and every congressmen who votes for that will claim to have read and understood all those details too. At least NAFTA was a foreign-type treaty with two other countries, but were foreign treaties always this long? Pages and pages and pages. Sometimes it seems to me that battalions of government lawyers have launched a silent coop against our country for their own profitable gain.
Apr '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
I gotta copy of it somewhere. I'm in favor of its length. With any law, you trade off the benefits of specificity (ie., the bureaucrats don't get to write it for themselves) against the benefits of flexibility (ie., they do). With trade treaties, the benefits to specificity become dramatically greater, since everything is negotiated (and it really was; the Nafta negotiations were colossal). Unlike Obamacare, the document is navigable.
I only know one of the negotiators personally, but I can assure you she was not motivated by profits (she's gone back into academia now, but has a real passion for the subject).
Mar '11
Re: Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson: Patrick J. Buchanan
If you believe that America exists because of God's providence, then America's interests and Israel's are joined at the hip.