Quote of the day 9th March 2018

"Protectionism is a scythe that slices through core conservative principles, including opposition to government industrial policy, and to government picking winners and losers, and to crony capitalism elevated to an ethic (“A Few Americans First”).

Big, bossy government does not get bigger or bossier than when it embraces protectionism — government dictating what goods Americans can choose, and in what quantities, and at what prices.

Down the decades, Trump has shown an impressive versatility of conviction, but the one constant in the jumble of quarter-baked and discordant prejudices that pass for his ideas has been hostility to free trade. It perfectly expresses his adolescent delight in executive swagger, the objectives of which are of negligible importance to him; all that is important is that the spotlight follows where his impulses propel him."



(George Will in the National Review, explaining why Donald Trump's proposed import taxes on foreign steel and aluminium would be bad for the American economy even before any retaliation from the rest of the world, and are not something that Conservatives - or anyone else - should support. You can read the whole article here.)

Comments

Jim said…
I find these ideas totally idiotic. I'm going to show why.

I have just returned from a holiday (heard you had a dusting of snow here, i saw some on top of mount Teide, but other that that its been quite nice really)

I did not mention that to rub it in that you have been a bit chilly and I have been enjoying 25 - 30 degrees for 2 weeks. Well, not totally anyway, you see I'm setting up another analogy here.

You see the hotel I stayed in was 1/2 board but did not include drinks at the evening meal or at the bar, you could not pay as you for your drinks you had to bill to your room and pay at check out.

So for 2 weeks we were getting nice drinkys and all we were doing was signing a bit of paper. Nice driky, bit of paper, WINNER

When i Checked out then Mr Receptionist said, bar bill is €140 please. you see the €140 is me exporting my labour to Tenerrife, its me paying my bill for for my driky poos.

So why on Earth would I want to introduce a rule that says they must provide me with the nice drinkys for a higher bill, its senseless.

I have thought for a long time that importing stuff is what a country wants, its like, Hooray, we get all this lovely stuff and all we sent out were some poxy bank notes, hooray.

Oooo, we best export something to pay for this or we are up the creek and we will have to make our own paddles

11:12 am
Chris Whiteside said…
Indeed. I once saw a clip in which Milton Friedman ridiculed the sort of mercantilist idiocy Trump is pushing in a sentence. He said something like "there is nothing easier for us to make and export in return for goods and services than little green bits of paper."

And for everyone American worker whose job in the steel or aluminium industry is made marginally more secure by the "protection" provided by making it more expensive for Americans to buy steel and aluminium from abroad, there are ten American workers whose jobs are threatened because they work in industries who use steel and for whom this means higher costs, and a hundred American consumers for whom it means higher prices.
1:22 pm
Jim said…
Another concern he should have is since 1971, the petro dollar has given the USA a free pass to "export debt".

Fact of the matter is that the petro dollar is now in its dying days (if its still got any sort of heart beat now its temporary) this of course means that there are almost 50 years worth of "green bits of paper" already in nations other than the USA, what do you think will happen when they go home to roost?
1:56 pm
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