I wish more of our GOP leaders would speak clearly to our issues. Stop beating around the bush. I’m not likely to vote for a Trump, but his candor can only help advance public discourse. Sarah is blunt in a similar fashion.
“I wish more of our GOP leaders would speak clearly to our issues. Stop beating around the bush”
But the GOP is no longer a protectionist party. Or at least that’s my belief. It’s hard to tell anymore, as both parties promote protectionism and free trade periodically. Republicans have their Austrian/Chicago School free trade, but also their age-old Hamiltonian-Lincolnian merchantilism and anti-Chinaism. Democrats have their leftist “fair trade,” anti-globalist, anti-corporate factions. Yet both Democrats and Republicans backed NAFTA. And, despite a few squabbles and poorly chosen words, I have yet to see Obama go back on our general dedication to quasi-free trade.
Truth is, there is no protectionist party nor no free trade party. The intellectual climate is split between free trade and fair trade, but policy seems to have drifted toward free trade, with periodic jumps back. That’s to say nothing of the “permanent government,” which no matter who’s in charge, nor what they think will, always and forever push a sort of protectionism. ‘Cause that’s what governments do: control things.
The issue just sorta hangs there.