Posted on 07/25/2018 6:03:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
One of the great lies of modern politics is that when a policy fails, it's because someone just didn't care enough. It's a nostrum repeated frequently: If President Trump were to only care more about immigrant children, he'd find a way to unite them with their parents; if Democrats were to only care more about the homeless, they'd find a way to clean up Los Angeles and Seattle; if Republicans were to only care more about the sick, they'd find a way to bring down insurance premiums.
In reality, most failures are simply the result of unintended consequences.
Take, for example, President Trump's tariff policy. Trump believes that "Tariffs are the greatest," according to one of his tweets this week. Not only are they the greatest; they prevent us from becoming the "'piggy bank' that's being robbed." Trump looks across the vast savannas of the United States and sees domestic businesses undercut by foreign competition, and his immediate thought is to help those businesses by taxing their foreign competitors.
Unfortunately, his policy has unintended consequences: It raises prices and causes retaliatory tariffs. So domestic consumers pay more for products; domestic producers have to pay more for the inputs they use to manufacture their own products; and foreign markets are closed to American exporters. All of this means that some of the businesses Trump seeks to help actually get hurt, which is why both Whirlpool and Harley-Davidson have downgraded their profit expectations in the wake of Trump's policy.
But Trump still wants to demonstrate that he cares. And so, he undertakes a Band-Aid policy: subsidies to agricultural concerns hurt by his tariffs. This week, the administration announced a Department of Agriculture $12 billion subsidy directed at farmers who can no longer competitively export product to foreign markets. "(I)nstead of offering welfare to farmers to solve a problem they themselves created, the administration should reverse course and end this incoherent policy," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., accurately summed up.
It's not just Trump.
Democrats routinely complain about the price of rent in major cities but then institute rent control and subsidized housing, driving up the cost of development. In order to deal with the rising costs of rent, they push for an increase in the minimum wage, which causes more unemployment. Then they tax the businesses they've already penalized in order to pay for the unemployed.
Or they push for lower educational costs and seek government subsidies to drive down college tuition. But in doing so, they create a base rate colleges can now charge, driving up those rates.
Or they push for better Medicare subsidies, creating new demand, which drives up prices.
This is the problem with government policy in general: It's a blunderbuss. Collateral damage from any broad-based policy is likely to far surpass the damage undergone by individuals in a free market system, which means we ought to tread carefully when it comes to making such policy.
But we won't. Instead, we'll just chalk up such failures to a lack of will or spirit, and demand more action -- action that will fail. And then we'll repeat the cycle over and over, never suspecting that perhaps it's our good intentions that got us into trouble in the first place.
It’s not the producers, it’s the consumers, who refuse to pay higher prices for the things they consume. They also don’t want to pay higher taxes for a more civilized society, and thus impede progress toward a world of fairness and equality.
I think the author is wrong to believe that President Trump would not consider the results of tariffs.
It is a shame someone as bright and talented as Ben doesn’t see what Trump is doing with the tariffs. All our exports are already being hit with tariffs from other countries. Trump raises the stakes and gets all these countries to come out and admit tariffs are bad. Then he will propose....ok, let’s get rid of tariffs. The EU talks themselves into doing what they really don’t want to do. He did the same thing with Rocket Man.
Disrupt, then appease. Trump is winning, the US is winning and I am not tired of it yet.
For example, if you ask Ben "OK, of course in general you're right that all policy has unintended consequences, what would YOU do as president to counteract the fact that other countries have been doing this to us for years?
Secondly, (And Ben probably knows this,) Trump's tariffs are not intended as 'policy.' They are essentially a threat (negotiating position.) He is saying "If you really want to keep this bad behavior up, I promise my behavior will be far worse than yours."
It's the same as his Tweet months ago to Un -> My button is way bigger than yours.
So -> I like Ben, usually he has OK logic, and he's one of the main ones out there fighting the idea war for us, but he's simplistic and he 100% misses the point here if he tries to apply it to Trump's tariffs, because the tariffs are not policy, they are missiles.
Yes, Ben, duh, policy has unintended consequences and this is a good introductory class on that. However, this is the wrong example and it makes you look dumb, which you're not.
Little Bennie has always been a never-Trumpet of a cuck. How’s defending that pedophile-Tweeter Gunn working out for you, Bennie?
I am old enough to remember World War II, and it would be folly in the extreme to ignore how important it was that American production of these key metals was twice that of Germany & Japan combined. (I will certainly never disparage the heroism of our young men in uniform; but the inexhaustible supply of military hardware on our side was the key to final success.}
There’s that concept again, “impede progress toward a world of fairness and equality.”
The Constitution guarantees neither fairness nor equality. You are born equal, but everything changes after that; and that’s a good thing. And, fairness is a communist concept. It does not correspond to life; it corresponds to some perverted view of wants and desires.
If you are paid less than someone else, it’s because you are perceived by your employer as not putting out as much effort as your coworker. If you want more pay then work harder or get a different job.
It's bad, isn't it? Of course I was being sarcastic. Not too many of us here believe that fairness and equality are sane motivations for any sort of effective public policy ... I think.
Please note especially the first paragraph highlighted and quoted below from the Liberty Fund Library "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay, "The Impracticability of Socialism":
Note the writer's emphasis that the "scheme of Socialism" requires what he calls "the power of restraining the increase in population"--long the essential and primary focus of the Democrat Party in the U. S.:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classesthe class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. The struggle for life provides for the various wants of the human race, in somewhat the same way as the climatic struggle of the elements provides for vegetable and animal lifeimperfectly, that is, and in a manner strongly marked by inequalities and anomalies. By taking advantage of prevalent tendencies, it is possible to mitigate these anomalies and inequalities, but all experience shows that it is impossible to do away with them. All history, moreover, is the record of the triumph of Individualism over something which was virtually Socialism or Collectivism, though not called by that name. In early days, and even at this day under archaic civilisations, the note of social life is the absence of freedom. But under every progressive civilisation, freedom has made decisive stridesbroadened down, as the poet says, from precedent to precedent. And it has been rightly and naturally so.
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON
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