Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Trump Blinks
Under increasing pressure from the fallout of the trade war with China, it looks like President Trump may be walking back one of his campaign promises:
WASHINGTON—One year after withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Donald Trump has asked his top economic advisers to study the possibility of re-entering the trade pact negotiations.
Trump has deputized Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, to study the possibility of re-entering the TPP if the terms were favorable, the president told a group of lawmakers on Thursday.
The president’s new openness toward the TPP, which he had said during his campaign was a deal “pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” comes as he is facing criticism from farmers for his escalating trade battle with China. After Trump took aim at China with new steel and aluminum tariffs, Beijing responded by announcing it would place penalties on a list of agricultural products that would affect swaths of the president’s political base.
As a matter of policy, this is a big win in the column for “Good Trump” — it’s absolutely the right policy move from both an economic or foreign policy perspective. As a political matter, it remains to be seen how his base, vehemently opposed to most trade deals, will take the news that the President is going against them on one of his core campaign promises.
Published in Economics
Libertarians often make the perfect the enemy of the politically possible. To some extent, that is their role – to remind us that politics ultimately has to answer for principles beyond mere political expediency.
Libertarianism, especially capital-L Libertarianism is also a magnet for all sorts of contrarians, cranks, and weirdos. Lew Rockwell, for example, has the reputation for being more in the crank camp.
Let’s use a domestic analogy. Libertarians (little-l libertarians included) often point out the damage done, especially to the poor, by minimum-wage laws. I once got into an argument with a far more centrist Republican who took the position that, because minimum wages hurt the poor, Republicans should increase the minimum wage, in order to fend off an even bigger increase in the minimum wage by Democrats. Naturally, my libertarian instincts rebelled against such strategic thinking. But did the more centrist Republican have a point?
Sort of. If you think minimum-wage laws are bad, but there really is no alternative to increasing the minimum wage, you should go with the smaller increase. Part of the reason for libertarians’ existence, though, is to point out that maybe there is an alternative in matters such as these, even if it’s not one currently thought politically feasible.
So what you see here is the break between Paleolibertarians of the Mises Institute variety and other libertarians of the CATO/Reason variety (yes there are those at CATO who have problems with TPP). It mostly breaks down to a disagreement over whether the TPP can be considered free trade and in my opinion is an example of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Woods/Rockwell etc are right in that the TPP isn’t perfectly free trade, thus they oppose it on those grounds. Other libertarians, such as myself, look at TPP and say “Is trade more free with TPP than without it” – we answer yes and thus come down in favor of the agreement.
If someone says the country would be better off if black people had less influence, would we not call him a racist?
If someone says society would be better off if women had less influence, would we not call him misogynist?
So if someone says the world would be better off if America had less influence….
Remember a lot of libertarians hold to the Friedman school of trade which is that we should abolish all tariffs, quotas and regulations on imports immediately (Friedman said over a period of 5 years to allow for businesses to adjust) and just let the rest of the world react. This is opposed by most conservatives as far as I know. Hence you have those of us who will support measures like TPP which makes things better overall, if not perfect based on our ideology.
Given that most of the founders thought that America should stay out of world affairs I fail to see how this reflects on ones patriotism.
If you had told your wife that your goal was to “fundamentally transform” her, would she have married you?
To be fair, several of us lady Ricochetti have penned OPs at one point or another lamenting the influence of women in general on modern life, and wishing there were less of it.
Btw if you think the internecine conservative wars are annoying get a bunch of libertarians together. 10min in and they’ve all excommunicated each other as heretical statists and one of them has jumped naked from the stage.
I’d like to take this opportunity to declare Fred a vile statist.
That’s okay. Nothing you say matters bc it is not in perfect agreement with me.
Fred Asked me to post this:
This gave me such a good laugh. I needed that. Thanks, Jamie!
… surprising for a libertarian to be so cavalier about such selective Maoistic/Stalinistic political persecution …
What’s not surprising ….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGjIW6XQnKo
Things were wrong then and they’re still wrong. For one thing, Vietnam gets to keep its tariffs on bovine carcasses and half-carcasses for two years, while US bovine carcasses and half carcasses go to 0% immediately. That’s completely unfair.
Also, the year 1 tariffs on “meat and edible offal of poultry, not cut in pieces, fresh or chilled” starts at 36% for Vietnam, but ours starts at 0%. What a ripoff! I’ve got all this edible offal of poultry, not cut in pieces, fresh or chilled. I’ve gotta move it, but I can’t sell it to Vietnam without taking a huge haircut! Unfair!!!!
Don’t even get me started on Vietnamese smoked rock lobster tariffs. I’m about to have a nervous breakdown just thinking about the unfairness of it all. I demand a just and equitable tariff reduction schedule for all TPP countries!
Do you have a less…sensationalist analysis of what happened?
The Mises Institute, Rockwell, Woods camp are your isolationist anarcho-capitalists. Anything involving state activity, whether decreasing or increasing state power, is essentially a sin. I mean they support nullification and splitting the nation into dozens, if not hundreds, of small states so as to prevent military action from anyone. Its a very odd cocktail of ideas.
Plus with Rockwell you also get conspiracy theories and alt med nonsense.
I may make a new post to deal with this at length. I am working on several articles so it may be a while. But I should comment that I lived in the Chicago area from 1993-2016 and one picks up a lot of things:
1. My wife talked to Obama 1-1 in her office for 15 minutes in 1996. She thought that he was unusually deceptive even for a politician.
2. We were very good friends with Milt Rosenberg who interviewed Obama. His campaign tried to shut down Milt’s Show twice in 2008. They were thugs. Milt said that he had never experienced this kind of attack from a campaign in over 30 years on WGN.
3. Obama’s roommate in college said that he was a Marxist. Some people grow out of that. There’s no evidence of this for Obama.
4. Obama’s association with Bill Ayers appears to go back further than has been publically announced. He appears to have been seeking out radicals rather than the reverse. He states this explicitly in Dreams.
5. I met a gentleman two weeks before the election who said that he had worked for Obama and that he was a dangerous radical. I couldn’t confirm this but he had some interesting details about his work for O.
6. You should check out Stanley Kurtz’s writings about Obama’s war on the suburbs.
He was making a case so used the best evidence at hand for the case he wanted to make. Was it fabricated? I didn’t need D’Souza to reach the same conclusion, but then I spent my life dealing directly or indirectly with the anti American left (and right) around the world. It’s not hard to recognize especially with Obama because he seemed to believe and was consistent with that particular brand of anti colonial left. You should see it now that they have the hysterical anti Trump US press to feed them a daily dose. In Latin America it’s a cultural bias, which I finally understood after serving in New Zealand where English speaking self-righteousness is purified by centuries of isolation.
I didn’t like the TPP for the simple reason I don’t like these kinds of deals especially with Asians and I didn’t trust Obama. For that matter I don’t trust the current administration to craft them either. It’s too complex,we don’t have the same expertise, continuity and patience to come out ahead so we just please a few really pushy special interests. However, I regret that this discussion ended where they all do about Trump’s character.
Obama is a radical who got away with as much of a radical agenda as was politically feasible during his eight years.
Obama’s most impressive quality as a politician was to make most people believe he was the reasonable moderate just trying to do what most folks wanted, and selling to the gullible (or those who just wanted to “like” Obama …. the crease in the pants and all … look at me, I voted for a black guy kind of “like” him) that anyone who opposed Obama’s policy agenda were the right wing radicals.
You mean other than the fact that he hasn’t advocated for Marxism? Thomas Sowell was a Marxist in college. It tells us nothing.
I fall into the “why fundamentally change something you love” camp.
I wrote “some people grow out of that. There is no evidence of this for Obama.” You quoted three sentences I wrote and ignored two of them.
The evidence being that he hasn’t advocated Marxism.
What do you think he has advocated? It’s interesting to recount some of the lies his campaign told:
1. He was never a Muslim – records in Indonesia surfaced that he was.
2. He was never a socialist – Stanley Kurtz proved that he was a member of the New Party which was a socialist party.
Obama was marinated in far leftism from an early age:
3. Close association with far left people – Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan (may not have been as close as the first two but interesting how they were able to hush it up), Al Sharpton etc. I assume you know about Sharpton. Would a R president be a guest on a radio show hosted by a KKK member? Sharpton has blood on his hands.
For Obama and zoning see
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-fires-affh-warning-shot-over-hillarys-house-stanley-kurtz/
Oh good. Obama the secret Muslim.
I didn’t write that he was a Muslim today. His school records show that he was listed as a Muslim in Indonesia. Do you dispute this. His campaign denied it but the records show that his religion was Islam.
Not so secret … your blindness is willful …