Posted on 04/18/2005 6:37:40 AM PDT by A. Pole
These are not the halcyon days of the Republicans' champion of open borders and free trade, Jack Kemp.
The "Minutemen," who appeared in Cochise County, Ariz., April 1 to highlight the invasion President Bush will not halt, are being hailed by conservative media and congressmen as patriots, as they are dismissed by the president as "irrational vigilantes."
Comes now the trade shocker for February. The deficit hit an all-time monthly record: $61 billion. The annual U.S. trade deficit is now running at $717 billion, $100 billion above the 2004 record.
Smelling political capital, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are co-sponsoring a 27 percent tariff on goods from China. Beijing ran a $162 billion trade surplus with us in 2004 in what trade expert Charles McMillion calls "The World's Most Unequal Trading Relationship."
The waters are rising around the Kemp Republicans. For these gargantuan deficits are sinking the dollar, denuding us of industry and increasing our dependence on imports for the components of our weapons, the necessities of our national life and the $2 billion in borrowed money we need daily now – to continue consuming beyond our capacity to pay.
Brother Kemp is correct in his Washington Times column in saying Beijing has not been manipulating its currency. China fixed the value of the renminbi at eight to the dollar in 1994, just as we once tied the dollar to gold. Beijing rightly objects, "It is not our fault your dollar is sinking."
But here, the free-traders enter a cul de sac. They recoil at tariffs like Lucifer from holy water, but have no idea how to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs, technology, factories and dollars, except exhortation and prayer. For as 19th-century liberals, they believe free trade is "God's Diplomacy." Whoever rejects it sins in the heart. True believers all, they will ride this raft right over the falls and take us with them. This unyielding belief in the salvific power of free trade is, like socialism, one of modernity's secular religions.
As Kemp's column testifies, these folks are as light on history as they are long on ideology. Kemp claims "there is no demonstrable instance in economic history where nations were made worse off by free and open trade. There are only the doomsday scenarios spun out of the imagination of half-baked economists ..."
But between 1860 and 1914, Great Britain, which began the era with an economy twice the size of ours, ended it with an economy not half the size of ours. Britain worshipped at the altar of free trade, while America practiced protectionism from Lincoln to McKinley to Teddy Roosevelt to Taft. Tariffs averaged 40 percent and U.S. growth 4 percent a year for 50 years.
Bismarckian Germany did not exist in 1860. But by 1914, by imitating protectionist America, she had an economy larger than Great Britain's. Were it not for protectionist America shipping free-trade Britain the necessities of national survival from 1914 to 1917, Britain would have lost the war to Germany, so great was her dependence on imports. A real-life "doomsday scenario," thanks to a few dozen German U-boats.
Jack Kemp notwithstanding, protectionism has been behind the rise of every great power in modern history: Great Britain under the Acts of Navigation up to 1850, the America of 1860 to 1914, Germany from 1870 to 1914, Japan from 1950 to 1990 and China, which has grown at 9 percent a year for a decade. As China demonstrates, it is a mistake to assume free trade, or even democracy, is indispensable to growth.
Kemp trots out Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 tariff law, for a ritual scourging, suggesting it caused the Depression. But this, too, is hoary myth. In the 1940s and 1950s, schoolchildren and college students were indoctrinated in such nonsense by FDR-worshipping teachers whose life's vocation was to discredit the tariff hikes and tax cuts of Harding and Coolidge that led to the most spectacular growth in U.S. history – 7 percent a year in the Roaring Twenties. Under high-tariff Harding-Coolidge, the feds' tax take shrank to 3 percent of GNP.
As high tariffs and low or no income taxes made the GOP America's Party from 1860 to 1932, the Wilsonianism of Bush I and Bush II – open borders, free trade, wars for global democracy – has destroyed the Nixon-Reagan New Majority that used to give the GOP 49-state landslides. Bush carried 31 states in his re-election bid. He would have lost had Democrats capitalized on the free-trade folly that put in play, until the final hours, the indispensable Republican state of Ohio.
Kemp calls China our trade partner – surely a polite way to describe a regime that persecutes Catholics, brutalizes dissidents, targets 600 rockets on Taiwan, lets North Korea use its bases to ship missile and nuclear technology to anti-American regimes, and refuses to denounce racist riots designed to intimidate our Japanese allies.
As some on the Old Right have said since Bush I succeeded Reagan, open borders, free-trade globalism and wars for democracy are not conservatism, but its antithesis. And they will drown the GOP.
The Republicans jumping off the raft into the river and swimming desperately for shore testify to it more eloquently than words.
I don't need a history lesson. Tariffs on China are a no brainer
I hate to break this to you, but the guy with the "McJob at Wal-Mart" today enjoys a standard of living that would be the envy of that unionized factory worker 30 years ago.
They don't want to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs, technology, factories and dollars. It's the mantra of their globalist vision of a small ruling elite, serviced by an unending supply of cheap labor.
I don't disagree with you there, men will certainly do evil in pursuit of profit. Or in the pursuit of love, power, or whatever equals desire to an individual or group. We can't do without rules of ethics and conduct that prevent the doing of evil, even in a free society. I will say that my opinion is that the free market is itself a conservative cultural value, though.
My feeling is that the problem of black crime in the inner city has more been caused by the institution of the welfare state than by any lack of protectionism.
However, the demise of the garment industry is an example of jobs probably lost in New York, especially upstate, I think. I'd be interested in anyone's take on that situation.
That's like saying that the high cost of housing has resulted in a decline of our standard of living -- because the 4,000 square foot colonial on a half-acre lot with a two-car garage costs more than the two-bedroom sh!t-hole that was the "norm" 100 years ago.
The prime function of civilization is the domestication of male urges. Teaching them that if they follow the rules and control their impulses it is in their long term self interest. A society without light industrial, low skilled factory jobs cannot offer young minority males an alternative to street life, gangs, and a very violent, destructive, sexually promiscuous masculinity.
It wasn't always like this. Once Harlem was nice. Once the cities of the Northeast had stable, church-going, working class communities. Take away employment and respectable people no longer control the streets. Now idle young men do.
That's about what we have been telling the free traitors for the past few years.
I remember some of that. You can't expect these guys to take faggy office jobs.
I'm not so sure about that. There hasn't been this kind of "light industry" for most of the world's history. I mean, does anyone expect us to go back to an agrarian economy where everyone had to earn a living with their hands?
What nonsense you are talking.
Are you honestly going to tell me that because he has a DVD player and a Playstation the guy with the McJob at Walmarts is better off than his grandfather was ? Are you honestly going to tell me that a Playstation is worth more than a house and health insurance and a pension ?
Actually, the high cost of housing has most definitely resulted in a decline in our standard of living. Adjusted for inflation, the same suburban house costs vastly more in 2005 than it did in 1970. Crime sent middle classes pouring out of the cities in the 70's, driving up the cost of the nice house on Maple Drive. Safe towns with good school districts will cost more than cities or inner suburbs. In 1970 one income paid for it. Now it requires two. The car, by category, costs the same adjusted for inflation. But now it requires six years to pay off instead of three. THE SAME MONEY REQUIRES TWICE AS LONG TO PAY AS IT DID THIRTY YEARS AGO.
I am sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about! Concepts like added value, accumulation of capital, advancement of means of production are critical elements of Marxist theory. Marx wanted capitalism to go on the path of global free trade, because he thought that it will bring the victory of socialism.
Radical Marxists (like Bolsheviks) despised and hated the trade unionism, labor laws, Church social doctrine, solidarism, redistribution of wealth, socialdemocracy, welfare and similar reformist compromises. They wanted unequalities and class struggle to intensify and to end in the violent revolution.
Did Germany expand then?
Half your labor force will be composed of people of poor backgrounds or average intelligence who require "light industry". The assumption of free trade that such displaced people would just go to community college and learn to become web programmers was ridiculously unrealistic.
Light industry has existed for most of human history. First it was called agriculture. And most factory work could be called light industry way back when. Domestic service was always primarily for women.
Half your labor force will always need to work repetitively with its hands in one form or another. A society that cannot provide stable livelihoods to people who work with their hands will be a society threatened with idle, uncivilized, young men.
My family owned an NYC factory that was exactly the light industry you write about. NYC used to be full of such businesses
And add the fact that as living standards drop Americans will no longer wish to pay the cost of being a superpower.
Sigh - willful ignorance is no defence. Buchanan himself lists Smith's four exceptions - which one applies to Chinese trade? Protecting commodity manufactured goods as incipient technologies? The point was, there are plenty of respected journals to support your side - don't go playing with the opposition's if you don't fully understand them.
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I suppose we could amuse ourselves by limiting the discussion to early 18th century corn laws and the corn trade. :-)
You just made it up! Marx did not want any redistribution, he wanted the revolution. You guys should learn a little before you spout your phantasies.
You know the falshood to be true. Interesting.
1. He had fully-paid medical insurance, while I have to pay 25% of my insurance costs and I have $20 co-pays, too.
2. He had a fully-funded pension plan, while I must save my own money and hope for a decent company match in my 401(k) plan.
3. He paid cash for his first car. I had to finance mine for five years.
4. He could afford to buy a home when he was my age, but I can't.
5. He could afford to send his kids to good schools, but I wouldn't be able to.
Sounds like he had a higher standard of living than me, right? Well, maybe -- but only if you neglect to mention some very important facts, like these:
1. He had fully-paid medical insurance in a time when a typical hospital's biggest annual expense was the laundry bill for its linens, and anything more serious than a broken bone was beyond the skill of just about every doctor at the time. The terms "magnetic resonance imaging," "CAT scan," "electro-cardiogram," and "laproscopic surgery" didn't mean anything back then, and the term "cancer" was synonymous with a death sentence.
2. His "fully-funded pension plan" has driven his company bankrupt, and if he were still alive today then I (along with all my fellow taxpayers) would be his "fully-funded pension plan."
3. The vehicle that I financed for five years came equipped with airbags, anti-lock brakes, a four wheel drive system, air conditioning, a CD player, and any number of other things that he never heard of until he was in his 70s. Most important of all, the vehicle that I financed for five years is now 12 years old and has nearly 300,000 miles on it. I don't think he ever came close to that.
4. Actually, I could afford to buy my own home -- but with property tax rates as high as they are in the area I live, I wouldn't even bother "buying" a home because I would never really own it. In addition to this, the primary factor in the rise of housing costs in this country has not been wage stagnation, but a massive increase in demand for this housing. When my grandfather bought his first home there were 120 million people in this country -- now we are approaching 300 million, and the cities aren't getting any less crowded.
5. He could afford to send his kids to good schools because education wasn't the overpriced racket back then that it is now.
If you still think he had a better standard of living than me, consider this: I saw more places in this world in the first 25 years of my life than he ever saw in 85 years.
That is not really what I did.
I was trying to be fair to both sides by paraphrasing the claims made by two directly affected industries. Sometimes, when you rob Peter to pay Paul, Mary gets shot. And sometimes when Paul gives Peter a helping hand Mary finds herself in the family way.
I'm just admitting economic life is not simple and frequently causes someone some unintended but necessary pain.
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