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Free-Market Donald
Donald Trump was the most free-market-oriented president we’ve had since Ronald Reagan, and the economy showed it. Probably because of his rhetoric, many people don’t know about the Donald’s free-market proclivities. The people that don’t know about it seem to fall into two major categories:
- Ardent Trump supporters.
- Ardent Trump haters.
Protectionism prevents President Trump from being a free-market purist, but he was more marketed oriented than his four predecessors. Some, though not all, of that protectionism was justified for strategic and moral reasons.
It was the free-market side of his policies that made the economy roar. Rich, poor, corporations, workers, and people of all races benefitted. Not to mention all 37 genders. Of course, the Left will reverse it all in the name of Compassion.
It is heart-breaking to see Trump’s strongest supporters reject the free market.
Exhibit A is Tucker Carlson. Tucker has many virtues, particularly his Limbaugh-esque ability to highlight the Left’s absurdities. Tucker is an asset to conservatism, but he’s out to lunch on economics. I’m grateful it was Trump, and not Tucker, managing economic policy during the Trump years. Another example is Pedro Gonzales, who writes for American Greatness. Mr. Gonzales likes to blame all kinds of things on the free market, including the Texas power outages.
Many Republican Trump-haters see themselves as free-market supporters. Some are, but many supported Bush’s re-regulation of the economy and the bailouts he did at the end. They couldn’t distinguish between capitalism and crony capitalism.
And then there’s the oleaginous Mr. Romney … Where do I begin?
There will be many debates about what aspects of Trumpism we should keep. Willingness to fight back should be at the top of the list, and support for free markets should near the top.
Free market concepts might not get us elected, but their abandonment will get us un-elected. People respond to results, and screwing up the economy is always bad politics, especially for conservatives.
Published in General
Supply and demand are (usually) not linear. Have oil and gold increased linearly?
Absolutely, Moore’s law is increased efficiency, but we are at the limits of physics so it remains to be seen whether it will in the future or not.
Yeah, it’s because of the chips. Taiwan would no longer sell the chips to the mainland, so there was a switch. But there was something like a $5 billion subsidy involved with the chip plant being in Taiwan. I don’t know if there was one for Apple as well, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t.
This is a big deal.
It’s called comparative advantage. But for our inflationist system that is the best way to live.
I made a graph several years ago, and you’d be surprised how closely they track. I’ll see if I can find it.
If we really hit that limit, then the rate of efficiency improvement will slow down substantially. Who knows when that will happen. I remember when 33 Mhz was the upper limit on motherboard speed.
It has to do with heat and electrons interfering with one another. The work around being tried is quantum computing.
Remember when oil prices crashed but gold didn’t a few years back? Food prices have also been going through the roof because of China. They have had to destroy their animals because of infection and import everything.
I’ve heard this is true for the well-drilling industry in New Mexico, to give another specific example. It is having a significant impact on the home-building industry.
I’ll need to remake those graphs.
When you make a graph of how many barrels of oil you can buy with an ounce of gold, you will see market driven fluctuations. But when you track the dollar price of both on a single graph, they almost start to look alike. This would be using a logarithmic Y axis, which illustrates percentage changes better.
There are two causes of both inflation and deflation: 1.) Market forces which would include Moore’s law, the oil crash and food shortages and 2.) Monetary changes, illustrated by the price of gold. Sometimes they cancel each other out.
My contention is that it is asset price inflation, particularly stock market index, gold and silver, have been driven by all the new money. It is most liquid.
And using logs will linearize.
Using logs will linearize something that changes at a constant percentage rate. The other thing they do is make it easier to compare percentage changes on two or more different items.
Say for example oil is at $100 a barrel and gold is at $1800 per ounce. If they simultaneously jumped by 20%, the increases will look very different on a linear graph but exactly the same on a logarithmic graph, and one could easily see they both increased by the same percentage.
The two graphs below show the same fictional 20% increase in the price of gold and oil:
Look at the logarithmic graph you can see they both changed by the same percentage amount, albeit not the same dollar amount.
This is too hard though. Let’s just give everything to the government and let them pass it out according to our needs.
It is a bit into the weeds, isn’t it?
I love myself. lol
Rufus R. Jones, Great American
Watch this one next. lol