Bloomberg 3/3/19 GET TRUMP#1

***By the time he actually ran in 2016, he (President Donald J. Trump) had re-purposed himself as a market-driven conservative to win the Republican nomination, and ultimately, the White House. The billionaire candidate said in 2016 that he tried to pay as little tax as possible, and since then has generally compared Democrats’ tax-the-rich plans to the socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.***

1. He did NOT run as a “market-driven conservative”! He was opposed by the Koch brothers the Bush family, the Clinton Crime Family, Mittens Romney, Chambers of Commerce, Business Round Table, EU, UN, and every other tool of Globalism. In other words he has all the right enemies and that speaks well for him. Clearly Trump did not run as a market-driven conservative! To say otherwise is deliberate ignorance or a lie.

The market-driven “conservatives” are Misesean hyper-libertarians. This philosophy serves their business model: outsource labor to low wage countries and import to the highly desirable US market. Good for Multinationals, and their shareholders BUT DESTRUCTIVE OF SWATHES OF AMERICA! And exterminating to the Middle Class that lived, loved and raised families in manufacturing towns now have become the Rust Belt. Where baby baby-boomers swarmed and played ringolevio until streetlights went on and parents began yelling for their kids to get home NOW! blocks and blocks of abandoned homes stand. The only economic activity is illegal drug sales.

Where once the mighty Arsenal of Democracy produced materiel enough to supply the American military to simultaneously mount massive armadas and invasions in Normandy and the Pacific while supplying the USSR the means to hurl Germany out of Russia and into the heart of Europe: stands the Rust Belt. The Rust Belt stretches from Buffalo to Duluth on the Great Lakes, including what should be made into Gary Indiana National Post-Deindustrialisation National Historic Park. (Driving through along the local road on the way to Chicago one evening [just to see the country off the Interstate system] in crepuscular light, either a boar or a feral hog stood sideways in my lane. It turned its eyes to us, and they reflected red. I was actually frightened! Then it turned its head and sauntered off after having demonstrated its right of way. It was huge! It was post-apocalyptic.)

So clearly Donald J. Trump did not run as a Bushie-Free trader!

2. “The billionaire candidate said in 2016 that he tried to pay as little tax as possible, …” Of course! Isn’t there an entire industry of tax accountants whose entire purpose is to minimize tax exposure? This sentence alone proves the essential hit piece nature of the Bloomberg news story. BTW, didn’t we just learn that the Soda Pop Police Chief, former Mayor Bloomberg, has taken office space presumably for his Presidential run? When will the media ask about the “ethics” of using his media empire as an arm of his campaign? *yawn* silence.

3. It was 1999! I know I have changed my mind on many things over the past twenty years. I was still an apologist for international free trade and considered it a corollary of libertarianism. I trusted GWH Bush over the need for the USA to lead a war against Iraq over Kuwait and defended his record. But after 9/11 I said after the second plane hit, that plane will be the death of Saddam Hussein, even though I did not believe he would be behind such a suicidal plan. I was angry and if Saddam gave an outlet, crush him!

Oh but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now!

TRADE POLICY: the elephant ignored

TRADE POLICY (The Missing Debate)

Of all the candidates this cycle only Donald Trump made Trade Policy an important part of his message.  This is unfortunate because it is the great elephant in the room!

Ron Paul admits in “End The Fed” somewhat grudgingly to be sure, that the Constitution does indeed grant Trade Policy to the Congress.  The Congressman however is emphatic that though the power is there, no trade policy other than Free Trade is worthy of consideration.  I believe the Congressman’s Free Trade support is due to libertarian philosophy rather than to a pragmatic sense of what is best for America.  It is no secret that Ron Paul is an acolyte of the Austrian School of economics.  Libertarianism is said to be inconsistent with Trade Policy.  I disagree.  Unless one’s libertarianism is such that the existence of international borders, and the existence of Nation-States itself is considered illiberal.  For if one does accept that there indeed exist sovereign states with international borders, one must accept that there has to be consequences of these borders or they would be no more than abstract lines on a map.
Therefore borders must have consequences.  If our Constitution recognizes the Congress as having the authority to develop a national Trade Policy even the lack of having one, is itself a policy.

Yes, no policy is to have a policy, even if it leaves the nation de-industrialized and in debt.  Yes, poor monetary policy has allowed America to follow a poor Trade Policy for the past half century.  Ron Paul is correct on the evils of the current monetary policy, but he seems to not notice that it is this very monetary policy that has allowed the United States to follow its Free Trade policy out beyond its natural sustainability. If we had sound money, eventually we would run out of cash by buying the world’s production while selling little in return.   If we had a normal monetary system, and did not have the advantage of printing the world’s reserve currency, eventually the worth of the goods we import with our fiat dollars would exceed the worth of those dollars and then we would not be able to import more.  Until recently there has always been a demand for the Dollar because all of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars.  Thus, we could print more, and import more and more.
What we have done with the help of the Fed, is to advance down a road of decreasing self-sufficiency that is being hidden by the printing press.  But as the access to the Printing Press becomes more problematic, as our Fiat currency is backed only by faith.  Once faith starts to erode, it erodes faster and faster with no one wanting to be holding the last dollar!  When this day comes, we shall find ourselves dependent upon the world for every single item of our lives, but be unable to purchase any of it.

In the Great Depression a large percentage of Americans lived in rural areas.  Though dirt poor, they did not starve.  Even if dinner was corn on the cob, it was a dinner.  Now, almost the entire population is urban or suburban.  We do not know how to make clothes, shoes, bread, meat, TV’s, telephones, computers, chips; nothing.  Nothing, except dollars, that is!  And as we have noticed that demand is shrinking fast!
Why has Trade Policy been savaged by all sides of the political spectrum on America?  It is “mercantilist” as if that is self-evidently a bad thing to be.  Yes, the Empires of Europe were mercantilist and saw the world’s wealth as a zero sum, a limited amount, thus incumbent upon each nation to claim as much for itself as possible while limiting its rivals’ gains.  Somehow this “Mercantilist” Philosophy was proven wrong in the Modern Age, as Spain’s wealth from the New World merely sped it along the trajectory of indolence.  Or was it World War I that was caused by Mercantilist economics?  All very unclear other than the accepted wisdom that mercantilism was a dead letter.  Or is it?

The benefits of Free Trade have been widely touted.  Those nations that produce X more efficiently than others should trade with those nations that make Y more efficiently than they do X.  Everyone benefits, and there is no down side.  This fails to account for differences in employment standards.  Clearly slave labor will always result in lower cost items than those made by well-paid middle class laborers.  The thinking then is that we should be grateful to the poor slaves or proles because we get to save money on the product.  And this extra saved money can go to buying something else.  The moral equation is not even addressed here, but we all have heard of children in sweatshops working their fingers to the bones making our athletic shoes.  Oh, jolly swell!
But forgetting the morality of it, what do we say about the economics?   Ideally, Free Trade is supposed to be the inverse of the Marxist from each according to his ability to each according to his need: each will produce according to their ability and efficiency and what they excel at, and buy the things that others efficiently and excellently produce.  Yet, like Marxism this too is a subtle utopian idea.  The assumption is that there will be a close approximation of reciprocal skills and efficiencies for the various goods and services we need in the Modern World.  But, what if there is not?  What if nations like China can employ tens of millions in factories in conditions that no American or Western European would enter voluntarily?  And what if even the Chinese are not fully voluntarily engaged?  We have heard of contracts for employment that specifically require a promise to not commit suicide!  There are nets around the windows of some factories because of the high number of suicidal leaps.  This may indeed be the more efficient way to produce the gamut of consumer goods.  But is efficiency the only component of the equation?  What happens to the society that is lucky to benefit from the “foolish” decisions of producer nations, and becomes addicted to consumption of goods that are cheap yet of decent quality?  We can see what happens when we drive from Buffalo, NY, around the Great Lakes to Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Gary, then down the Mississippi to St. Louis.  Gary, Indiana was already a spooky post-apocalyptic place to drive though twenty years ago!  We have allowed steel to be imported from non-unionized nations; and surprise American steel isn’t competitive!  We cannot build a single Television in this country.  Remember, we were to do the high tech, and scientific research in this global division of labor.  But we do not.  It was manufacturing jobs in what are now the rust belt cities of the northeast, New England through the Great lakes that lifted more people, immigrants from every country on earth to a middle class lifestyle that was the envy of the world.  Gone, poof, for what?  We let go of the envy of the world for a philosophical purity of Free Trade?

The Free Trade acolytes will argue that Protectionism will merely protect inefficiencies and harm the interests of consumers.  But are there individuals who are purely consumers, and not producers?  If so they live by theft or charity.  It is ridiculous to claim to protect “consumers” while throwing producers to the dogs!  We are all both!
The US Car industry whined for Protection because Japanese companies were eating their lunch.  If the Japanese employees were paid the equivalent or provided the equivalent lifestyle as GM workers, then there ought not have been protection.  Fair Trade is not Protectionism.  But if Chinese electronics are made by pathetic souls who are under suicide watch, it is not Fair Trade to collude with the oppressors in order to buy cheaper plasma TV’s.

America needs to decide if the price for Free trade is worth paying.  What is the price?  It is first of all, increased unemployment, and under employment.  It is increased costs of welfare, and Medicaid.  We do not wish to become a third world-like nation having to step over the dying sick, and starving poor!  So, we will have to increase our taxes to pay for public services.  Public Services require Public Servants, and Public Servants join Public Servant Unions.  When their number reaches a critical mass, their very electoral input causes the nation to tip beyond the tipping point, beyond the hope of recovery of true prosperity.  But as US debt rises in response to the enlarging welfare state, the faith in our dollar, which has underwritten this journey to the edge of sustainability, begins to fail.  What will we do when Brazil does not want dollars for its shoes that are exported here?   We will go barefoot?  And when TV’s are not shipped over here for fiat paper, we will sit around and play Sudoku by the light of fluorescent bulbs made in China.  Oops, they will be unaffordable.  Plus we will have no electricity, because we will not produce our own energy supplies, and we have given billions of dollars to con men to produce electricity that becomes competitive at 1 to 2 dollars per kilo Watt hour (now we pay 2-3 cents for the same!)  And who will sell us energy for our paper dollars?

When Trade Policy is elevated into a Theological Position rather than dealt with as an ad hoc annual Congressional debate, we have allowed Washington to abdicate its proper role.

Is there any one single Trade Policy that benefits all sectors and individuals equally?  No, of course not.  But, does Free Trade benefit a majority?  No!  Free Trade IS a Trade Policy.  It just is not a smart one.

We need to add on to imported goods the additional cost it would take to produce them here.  If American companies choose to out source their manufacturing to overseas factories; fine.  It is a free country.  But they must not expect to be able to sell their products in the American economic zone!

The US Economic Zone is the single greatest in the world.  It ought to be treated as a great privilege to gain access to this market; we ought not treat it like Esau did his birthright!
We need to re-industrialize and create employment that creates true wealth.  Jobs that remove CO2 from emissions do not produce any actual value.  Somewhere something of actual value must be sold to pay the green paychecks.  Only in Academia would it be believed that performing a useless task becomes useful if the government defines it as useful.  Technology that does nothing but lower CO2 emissions does nothing of any intrinsic worth.  Only artificially valuing this by laws and regulations can it be sold, but even then no new wealth is created.  Government cannot make Fiat money worth more than people are willing to accept for it; and they cannot make fiat work produce wealth!

The United States needs to end the social welfare state.  The safety net has become a mattress for multiple generations.  With the Government or Society as the father figure, teenage Oedipal issues are turned into sociopathic fashions.

Tariffs once provided for the bulk of the Federal budget.  Once again, this can be done.  Imagine inner cities humming producing American-made shoes, of high quality and exported to the world.  American TV’s of world class clarity; it can be done.  Tariffs, to equilibrate the distortion of slave labor will encourage high tech manufacturing jobs throughout the northeast.  Bring on line American energy, and power American factories.  Reduce unemployment, and welfare.  Reduce the numbers of Public Servants and their power.  Reduce the cost of the government and reduce taxes and a positive reinforcing cycle will shake the world!

They tried to bow America’s head to accept their yoke?  How dare they think we would allow that?
We can turn the USA and the world around in six months if we started doing these things now.

Where is this debate?  Monetary policies have allowed this de-industrialization, but have not caused it.  It is Free Trade as dogma that has done so.  Unless we revisit trade policy as an actual issue and not as theology, we can audit the Fed until the cows come home.  If we do not produce more than we import we will not prosper, anyway you try to run monetary policy.  Fix trade policy and monetary policy does not matter.

To Newt, and all would be Presidents

Newt, I have always enjoyed listening to your speeches. I heard you on Satellite radio a couple of weeks ago in a rented car.  I do not know what it is you said that set off this sh_t storm.  But if we agree that the Federal Government has no legitimate role in providing health care or insurance then we are on the same page.  But, I am also dead opposed to the Free Trade Orthodoxy that you seem to embrace.

Libertarian Zealots preach that Chinese slave-like labor is good for Americans, it provides us with cheaper products.  Unfortunately these folks are so Libertarian that they believe the very foundation of Governments, i.e. the setting of physical borders between “us” and “them” is illiberal.  But to do otherwise is to force American labor to compete with Chinese or even more exploited labor.  I believe in a Liberty that is within borders.  We would have more liberty if we were to sacrifice some liberty at the border.  To the degree that libertarianism is not anarchy, we accept that there is a basic legitimate power which we have delegated to the government, in order to enjoy the bulk of our liberty in civil society. That minimal evil, Government, is most efficiently used to the public good by keeping most of the illiberality at the outer border.

Like a lever and fulcrum, any given amount of illiberality at the border, will be capable of performing more “work” than when diffused throughout the body politic.  For example, Immigration, is most efficiently stopped at a strong impermeable membrane, at the border.  Past the border, the Government feels it can deputize civilian employers into becoming unpaid Immigration officials.  By avoiding the illiberality at the border, we create the situation where federal agents can casually claim the right to burst in on factories and slaughterhouses and demand ID cards.

WE need to control our borders in a rational way, a way that concentrates as much of the total imposition of the burdens of centripetal force there, rather than spread though the entire society.  Drugs, legalized, or stopped.  If we cannot do the former, then we do the latter.  But, it is the insufficient attempt at controlling the border that empowers the now tyrannical War On Liberty in the name of War on Drugs!  Between illegal immigration and illegal drug importation it is as if someone were deliberately constructing the raison d’être to impose internal dictatorship.  The border must not be seen as a passive line in the dirt.  Like a cell membrane, it is the site of a host of complex actions and reactions.

For the greater part of American history, one of the greatest recurring political debates in the Congress was on Trade Policy.  It was expected that the myriad of special interests jostling one another would result in compromises and something most similar to “common interest” was discovered.  There was a natural humility that no one claimed to know the Common Good!  That has disappeared with the self-anointing of economists and other Specialists who believe they are gifted to know the Common Good, as they peer from their lofty height.  Free Trade, is a trade policy.  It ought not, and never had been a moral claim.  It is one of an infinite number of trade policies that a sovereign nation may enact at its borders.  The United States grew into the mightiest industrial economy in the history of the world behind stout Tariffs.  In the post WW2 years there were indeed national interests that were furthered by a policy choice of Free Trade.  In the aftermath of the war, the world lay smoldering except the USA.  By opening our markets to the world, we were able to reap the benefits due a conquering nation, i.e. the importation of what once would have been unaffordable.  It also served our Foreign Policy by kick staring Western Europe and Japan’s economies.  The re-establishment of a middle class was rightly seen as the most important factor in the containment of Communism.  Allowing access to our economy, the only truly functional economy in the post war years was a means of nudging the nations of the world to implement policies in favor of the USA.  Such supreme power was a once -in-world history phenomenon.  It is unimaginable to picture what a victory by the Axis powers would have looked like.  I believe it would have been very bleak indeed for a world exploited by NAZIs and Samurai!  But, that was an exceptional period of history.  That moment has passed; perhaps at the time of the downfall of the USSR.  But be that as it may, it passed.  Free Trade is n o longer in our Best Interests.  It is hollowing out our economy.  It is moving us into a post-industrial world.  The so-called service and intelligence processing industries have not risen to replace the high wages of the auto manufacturing industrial middle class whose grandchildren are left adrift at the high water mark of the Midwest and Great Lakes rustbelts.

We need to regain control of our border and make it work for us.  The right to export into the United States ought to be considered a fantastic boon, and not a bowl of beans!  How do we dare allow our corporations to produce everything overseas with cheap hazardous labor, in factories belching out toxic waste that dwarfs anything produced in the peak of our industrial age, to freely import their products back here?  No!

We would solve virtually every one of our major problems by returning the creation of Trade Policy to the realm of politics where it belongs, and out of the realm of Political Philosophy where it now resides.  We need to re-assert the right, the obligation, of Congress to legislate Trade Policy based upon self-interests jostling against one another.  This will be the closest approximation to The Common Good that flawed human being can achieve.

Newt, if these border issues are not addressed, the presidential campaign in 2012 will sadly be about selecting the last president of the United States of America.

Free Trade: A MALIGNANT IDEOLOGY

Free Trade is a malignant ideology. It is designed to destroy the American Middle Class. “They” the anti-capitalist, anti-liberty conservatives (in the true sense) have never conceded the point that the nobility and priesthood have been excluded from the modern world of which America was the nucleus. American History I believe should be taught as beginning in the English Civil Wars. At the heart of that war was the battle between the Landed Aristocracy/the Monarchy/the Established Church/the superstitious and manipulated peasantry, on the one hand, and the craftsmen, tradesmen, merchants of the towns, with their anti-Episcopal Churches and reformed Protestant theology, on the other.

Eventually after one king was executed and a brief period of “commonwealth” dictatorship under Cromwell ended with the threat of the return of the Stewart dynasty, the British were tired of war and invited Prince William of Orange (Netherlands) and his English wife, Mary to reign. While Britain was distracted by this chaotic period, the American Colonies were free to establish the first polities created rationally by enlightened Protestant middle class, for the middle class. When Britain later tried to bring the “upstarts” to heel they lost. But “nouveau riche” upstarts is how the Nobility and Warrior Class saw the Middle Classes. And the peasants and proletariat were used and manipulated by the Princes and Priests and their Pomp and Pageantry and taught to envy the Middle Class “upstarts” who “thought they were better than” them. Thus Napoleon and Hitler dismissed the Anglo-American commercial empires as nations of mere “shopkeepers”. BUT the EuroTrash has never really despaired of putting us back in our place!

Free Trade is their method, now. Through out-sourcing jobs that allowed a man to support his family in Middle Class comfort, we have been weakened. By allowing the re-import of the products that were out-sourced without having to pay a Tariff allows for maximum profit for the Upper Class, some of which they use to support “liberal” groups that keep the lower classes at odds with the Middle Class.

America has been unique in several ways. But one way has been in its unique history of having a consciously designed political system based upon the ideas that existed in Europe during the brief window between John Locke and the French Revolution. That window slammed shut like a guillotine, cutting American middle class Liberty off from Continental EuroTrash ideology of “Left and Right”.

WE NEED A TRADE POLICY THAT VALUES ACCESS TO THE AMERICAN MARKET AS THE GREAT BOON IT IS. The World has grown accustomed to its belief that America’s markets are freely open to all. This has led to the deliberate destruction of the Middle Class. It is the happy Middle Class that has given the lie to Marxist Utopian theology. Thus the Middle Class MUST be destroyed. And as Britain was the bulwark for Protestantism against the Catholic Habsburgs and Bourbons, America played that role against the Communists and Fascists. Free Trade must end as an ideological “good”. Sometimes perhaps Free Trade is in our interests and at other times protectionism better serves. In every debate over Trade Policy there will be interested parties that stand to gain or lose, based upon changing Trade. Political debate in Congress had been the method of bringing to bear the closest approximation of the best trade policy at any given time. These debates are between what have been derided as “special interests”. When I hear politicians using the phrase “Common Good”, like Ayn Rand I ask “for whom?” There is NO such thing as “The Common Good”, just as there is no such thing as “The Economy”. “The Economy” has no independent reality. It merely is the sum total of rational beings exchanging goods and services to advance their own perceived ideas of where their best interest lies.