Posted on 08/26/2015 5:47:02 PM PDT by WilliamIII
Here's a historical fact that Donald Trump, and many voters attracted to him, may not know: The last American president who was a trade protectionist was Republican Herbert Hoover.
Does Trump aspire to be a 21st century Hoover with a modernized platform of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped send the U.S. and world economy into a decade-long depression and a collapse of the banking system?
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Larry loses me on illegal immigration, but let’s think through your position. A US company can’t build an overseas factory and then import product to the US without a big tariff in your world, right?
So wouldn’t a big advantage go to a non-US company with a factory in that cheaper country, selling into the US? So would you slap a tariff on all products coming into the US? If so, wouldn’t you rightly have to expect a slew of tariffs on our exports in return?
So then you’d be hurting any US company that imports or exports products, right? And you also understand how you’d be taking away the wealth creation that comes with allowing and fostering comparative advantage, too, right?
And how is that going to do anything but hurt the American worker?
Whats wrong with an American Company doing business in America? You can create wealth in the USA.
and since our Trade Balance is VERY NEGATIVE ...by the billions...we would not be losing in a trade war, we would be winning. If our Trade Balance was positive then a trade war would hurt US.
Trump is Right on trade. Pun intended.
Because the reason a US company would go offshore, with all the hassle that entails, is because someone else can ship similar products from that offshore location more cost effectively than from within the US.
You’d be putting the American companies at a competitive disadvantage.
The voices must be getting loud - are you having visions to go with them?
"Winning" what, exactly? You think this an NFL game?
I have my doubts.
But it is OK if the countries selling to us have trade practices that ARE not free and open?
No, it's not okay - it is impoverishing their citizenry - while rewarding the connected, the powerful, the cronies, the oligarchs. That's what protectionism does, and it's what it will do here too. Let me say that again: that's what it will do here too. The cronies and the connected will decide who gets how much protection...powerful unions, powerful industries, and their lobbyists -and all 325 million consumers get screwed.
But your question misses the main point. That's not our call, how they treat their citizens. That's not the job of US President, and that's what we ware talking about here. It's simple: It's protectionism that's cronyism - it's liberty that is the opposite.
It's really sad, is it not, to see people so ignorant that they assume everyone who is rich understands the macro economy. Some do, some don't - accumulating wealth does not mean understanding economics necessarily. Trump's biggest wealth leverage is his name and his understanding of PR - and he's shown in this campaign that he's a genius at that. No doubt about it. He has a touch.
But that's hardly the same thing as understanding the entire economy. You can't say that around here though.
The concept of domestic competition is a foreign concept to the Free Traitor™.
Nothing could be further from the truth, but protectionism is how union thug and other establishment cronies carve out their own little niche - it may or may not have anything to do with domestic competition. This is why all the lobbyists are in Washington, to carve out their fifedom and quash all competition, domestic and foreign. It's the same lobbyists, the same companies, the same unions....screwing everybody.
I saw your earlier low information post about domestic competition, and it was so baseless that I ignored it the first time.
Who is the economic genius that you support again?
Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Sowell, Williams.
Get out of your fan boy status and consider ideas, not just people.
Damn shame none of them are running for President except maybe in your world.
and If I recall it was Laffer that showed the Reagan admin the simplicity of the curve.
I do believe he is an advisor to Mr. Trump.
Is it because their workers live in squalor while our displaced workers live in fine homes with running water and air conditioning?
And then liberals say that we have to give up our homes and move into dense urban housing?
Is it because their industries spew their waste into the air and water, while our industries have to recycle, reclaim, and dispose of waste?
And then liberals say that we have to protect the global climate because emerging third world countries can't?
Is it because their workers are paid a barely subsistence wage while our displaced workers are unionized and strike when companies are at their most vulnerable, sometimes killing the company instead of compromising?
And then liberals complain that we need government to protect jobs?
What if we kept industry here, and kept the jobs here, and paid the workers here, so they can live here and spend their money here buying products made here?
-PJ
>> Bernanke was a student of Friedman and Schwartz’s study of “The Great Contraction” and was worried that the collapse of the housing bubble could take the banking system down with it, in a replay of the 1930s. TARP and some other policies were intended to keep banks from going bankrupt as mortgage paper defaulted <<
Indeed. And in spite of all the unthinking and downright stupid vitriol aimed at Bernanke by partisans both left and right, I think history will judge him well. He was a serious and dedicated man who did mostly the right things, especially in light of the substantial limitations under which he had to operate.
>> I’d like to know more about the difficulties of competing with overseas manufacturers <<
Then you might want to dedicate a big portion of your life, as have I, to the study of classical and neoclassical economics — which teach that no matter how poor the workers might be in China and elsewhere, and no matter how stupid some of our own domestic economic policies might be, free international trade will benefit both us and them.
Specifically, the ideas of “specialization” as developed by Adam Smith in 1776, and “comparative advantage” as developed by David Ricardo in 1817, are just as valid today as they were 198 years ago. No proposition yet advanced in philosophy and the social sciences has ever been more rigorously and logically proven than the notion that free international trade benefits both the poor and the rich nations. Moreover, countless empirical studies have reached the same conclusion.
Likewise, the mercantilist mouthings of Donald Trump, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Bernie Sanders and the AFL-CIO are just as pernicious today as were the almost identical ideologies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Bob Kerrey and Dick Gephardt tried to play the mercantilist/protectionist card in 1992, but they both failed miserably. Protectionist Perot succeeded in that same year only to the extent that he insured the election of trade-friendly Bill Clinton over trade-friendly George Bush. If history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce, maybe 2016 will shape up to be the year that a farcical DT goes down in flames.
I am very conversant with the fair tax as the original proponent John LInder was my congressman for many years. I prefer the fair tax over all others. Sadly it will never happen at least not in this lifetime. So the next best thing is a flat tax.
Two things that will never happen in the US are the Fair Tax and term limits.
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