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.
Very profound argument for a freetrader.
Buffoon? Are you using the Verbal Advantage Vocabulary Program?
I urge you to read the pro-China-trade testimony referenced above in #307.
Getting the Chi-coms to comply with the WTO is a serious problem, as well as getting them to stop stealing intellectual property.
They are the abusive husbands and western businessmen are the battered wives going back for more and more.
The Chi-coms know Lenin very well, they know that they are dealing with useful idiots, IMO. I don't think that they are worried too much about minor details.
Remember, in 1992 we declared that "character doesn't count". Today we're just reaping that which we have sown.
Yes, you are right, that's pretty close to where I'm coming from.
Asked and answered. Proceed.
IAYSPAH.
"What GM is actually predicting is that the US market for GM cars will be gone by 2020."
At this point one needs to ask if GM includes itself as a going concern in any such forecast.
"You may have a job (or three) but what income are you bringing home? Look at the explosion of consumer debt. That's a big clue family income is a problem."
And the solution is tarrifs on imports? Why not just lower taxes and promote reduction in consumer debt?
The arguments have all been made, the fact that Buchanan and you haven't the capacity to understand them is not a profound revelation.
"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."
"The slogan describing the future communist society has nothing to do with the matter we discuss. Think harder."
We were discussing whether or not Marx believed in income redistribution. Sorry if that quote blows the lid off your attempt at historical revision, but I'm not the one who needs to think harder. You need to reread the quote and try to comprehend its meaning.
OK, let me help you. Marx hoped for the future Communist system where there is no private income or property. In this future world the means of production are to be so advanced and automatized that material goods will be overabundant. Only those who will desire so will work - primarily on the advanced creative aspects of production.
Others will be involved into non-economical activities like art and self-realisation. All will be enjoying their freedom from material worries and from struggle for survival. Everyone will receive according to his needs and contribute according to his talents.
In such world the redistribution, taxation will be meaningless. Private property (with the exception of personal belongings) and money will not exist as they will not be needed. The religion will disapear because religion according Marx (following Feuerbach) is a painkiller (opium for the masses) and a compensation for unrealised human potential.
In order to bring this future happy world the means of production have to be advanced, the mankind should be industralised and integrated into one economical whole and the class unequality with the suffering should be maximised so the revolution can be triggered. That is why free market capitalism, free formation of trusts/monopolies (no anti-trust regulations) and globalism is necessary.
Redistribution of income and wealth, labor laws, national solidarity, social church doctrine, etc ... make market capitalism more humane, more acceptable and more comfortable for the masses, inhibit revolutionary fervour and prevent emergence of one world economy and state. That is why radical Marxists (Bolsheviks/Maximalists) were opposed to the socialdemocracy, New Deal, trade-unionism (unless they could use unions as a vehicle for subversion), anti-trust measures and other tricks preserving the old system.
Capite signore?
Thank you for the additional information on "free trade" with China.
While acknowledging "challenges" in dealing with China, Mankiw's testimony obviously was intended to support the current course. Access to the full committee hearing gives everyone a chance to evaluate all sides of the question. Other hearings were held on the 14th, but I have not found the link . . . yet. C-Span televised it.
An excerpt from a small medical manufacturer's submission for the record:
Carus Chemical Company (“Carus”) of Peru, Illinois is a small family-owned company founded in 1915. Carus has 205 U.S. employees. Carus is the only remaining U.S. producer of potassium permanganate, a chemical that has important applications, including drinking water and wastewater treatment, and contaminated site clean-up.
[. . .]
Carus and its employees have very serious concerns about the unwillingness of Chinese enterprises to abide by existing international trade rules, particularly rules against the dumping of products. Our experience in recent years has repeatedly demonstrated that some Chinese enterprises simply do not take these rules seriously and will do whatever they can -- including making up data, forging documents and seriously misleading U.S. authorities -- in an effort to evade the antidumping laws. We also have broader policy concerns about the inability of existing U.S. trade laws and trade policies to prevent the continuing erosion of our U.S. manufacturing base. In particular, we are dismayed at continued reports that modern, efficient and environmentally sensitive facilities that provide good jobs to U.S. workers are being forced to give way to inefficient and environmentally damaging Chinese plants operated by enterprises that have little regard for their workers or for rules of fair trade.
Chi-com enterprises simply do not take these rules [international trade rules] seriously and will do whatever they can -- including making up data, forging documents and seriously misleading U.S. authorities. They are Communists. That's what they do.
As many have noted about today's MSM, they are glad today's MSM were not around during W.W.II they would have sabotaged the war effort.
Well I am glad that "free traders" were not permitted to give away technology, wealth, and our production facilities to the Soviets. In those days Country meant something though like today the "free traders" and progressives argued that helping to build up the USSR was best lest we play into the hands of the Communist hard liners and cause a war. Go figure.
I emailed pro-capitalist professor Rudy Rummel in Hawaii and asked him as follows:
>I am a conservative and always beleived in free trade. I just read
>the following from Pat Buchanan:
>
>"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."
>
>Is he right?
His answer was as follows:
This is misplaced causation. He is saying the free trade caused the
decline of the GB with regard to the US. Nonsense. While GB was being
drained by its colonial wars, the need for a dominant navy and large
army re a threatening Germany, and had already maximized its
expansion, the US was expanding westward, consolidating a huge
continent, and integrating the resources and capability that GB could
only envy, without any threat abroad or significant colonies prior to
1900 to drain these resources.
Now USA is not expanding, follows the free trade and maintains vast and costly military presence in hundred countries. Does not look it like GB described by your professor?
"China is growing faster, but not fast enough to catch up with the US at least in this half of the century I think"
I think you considerably underestimate them. 40+ years is a pretty good amount of time for them to catch up to...or even surpass..the US economy. Barring full-scale war with them of course, which I think is very likely in 20-30 years assuming we don't push them into it earlier over Taiwan. By that time all of the free trader technology and funding investment there will have rendered our military's personnel-skill level & technology advantage uselessly small.
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