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 did not see Sam advocating consumerism, which is the presumption underlying your refutation.
For Sam to be an "idiot" he would have to advocate for consumerism/materialism as a "good."
Seems that's more your position than Sam's.
There has been an increase in demand.
However, at this time, there are about 12 MILLION un-rented or vacant single-family properties out there.
By the way, since the average 1920's single-family bungalow had 1500 sf of living space (and another 700 available in the basement) and the average rental property has about 1500 sf of living space (and another 700 available in the basement) exactly HOW have things "improved?"
Wow. Cell-phones and Coke.
Not exactly Maytag appliance suites, but hey!
If, in ten or twenty years (as some claim), China will be the world's largest market for automobiles, what do you think will happen to Maytag sales?
Uniting already densly populated German states without the open frontier and enlimited resources like in America is not the expanding in the sense we talked about. Nice try, though.
http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.36,filter.all/scholar.asp
I guess this guy is a useful idiot too, then?
Well, you have that right. In fact, GE is one of these demons who sent every last stinking job of theirs to India.
One would hope that the Chinese choose laundry and cooking devices before cars--
I will grant you the speculative "10-20 years" ad arguendam.
Obviously, the Chinese will be buying vehicles which will be PRC-manufactured knockoffs of US vehicles. In other words, GM, FoMoCo, BenzChrysler will have been raped.
Quote: If, in ten or twenty years (as some claim), China will be the world's largest market for automobiles, what do you think will happen to Maytag sales?
Yes, china is going to have a huge market for cars in 10 years. The only problem is they are going to be buying them from their own companies, not the US companies.
GM spent million on a new factory in china for a small compact car. Cherry motors copied the car down to the littlest details and built their own assembly line and are now in competition with the GM model.
The big problem is GM spent the hundreds of millions on the design and R&D and cherry car co has very little because they bootlegges it. Little bastards.
Free trade pits people who live off of investments against people who live off of paychecks.
Thirty years ago TV repairman was a very common occupation. Now, since TV's are so cheap they are scarce.
Hogwash.
"Disprove" Smith? I embrace him, especially the following from Book Four, Chapter Two (say, isn't that what you claim to have read?):
It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. . . .
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage.
"Karl Marx was also a strong believer in a graduated (or progressive) income tax."
"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."
Here's a little quiz for you, AP. Who said
"From each according to his means, to each according to his needs"
Hint: his initials were KM.
well, that was one example. The guy said that the Chinese marketplace hadn't materialised. I proved him wrong for one type of product. There are other products for which the Chinese are major buyers: like steel, oil etc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.