Tag: G7

Dennis Prager on the Self-Righteously Suicidal West and False Morality

 

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had nationally syndicated radio host, columnist, author of numerous books, teacher, film producer and co-founder of PragerU, Dennis Prager, on the podcast to discuss among other things:

  • How Dennis Prager ended up a conservative as an Ivy League-educated Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn, New York — contrary to so many of his peers
  • How perceptions of human nature divide Left and Right
  • Whether government has filled the void of religion for the increasingly secular and progressive American coasts
  • How the good intentions that underlie Leftist policy prescriptions lead to horrendous outcomes — and emotion versus reason on the Left and Right
  • The false morality underlying European immigration policy with respect to the Muslim world, and Prager’s criticism of Jewish support of mass immigration consisting disproportionately of Jew-haters
  • The self-righteous suicidalism of the West
  • The Leftist bias of social media platforms and PragerU’s legal battle with YouTube/Google

You can find the episode on iTunes, everywhere else podcasts are found, download the episode directly here or read the transcript here.

Trump’s G7 Free Trade Zone Is a Breathtakingly Ambitious Idea. But Has It Been Thought Through?

 

President Trump’s idea to turn the G7 into a free trade zone strikes one as a bit impulsive and underthought. After all, the Trump trade record this year seems to suggest a different direction, from solar panel and washing machine tariffs back in January to the steel and aluminum tariffs in March to China tariffs perhaps coming up.

Of course, none of that makes a G7 free trade zone necessarily a bad idea. Not at all. In theory, at least, it’s a remarkable one, breathtaking in its ambition. As Financial Times trade reporter Shawn Donnan writes:

Imagine an industrialised free trade area for the ages with no tariffs or other barriers to commerce and only a goal of shared prosperity in the 21st century? From Europe in the Atlantic east to Japan in the Pacific west it would cover a $36tn economic zone and almost half of global output. It would be a remarkable free-market alliance against a rising China and its brand of state-directed capitalism. Talk about a presidential legacy project. It would be huge.