Showing posts with label free-trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free-trade. Show all posts

Monday, November 6, 2023

Joel Kotkin: The capitalist elite undermines our economic security

 He means libertarians.

Here:

Free-market dogmatists have played a part in the deindustrialisation of the West as well. Consultants and investors pushed businesses to look offshore for virtually every critical production input. Between 2004 and 2017, the US share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 per cent to 10 per cent. Our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled. The trade deficit with China, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has cost as many as 3.7million American jobs since 2000. Overall, the US and the EU have seen their share of value-added manufacturing drop from 65 per cent in the 1960s to barely half that today.

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Same old story: The Freedom Conservatives are godless, pro-immigration, free-trade libertarians

 Discussed here by John Fonte:

Unlike in both the Sharon Statement and the National Conservatism Statement of Principles, “transcendent values” and “God” are nowhere to be found in the Freedom Conservatism Statement . . ..

It is no accident that Grover Norquist, Jeb Bush, and mass immigration enthusiasts associated with Koch-funded organizations such as the Niskanen Center and The Bulwark readily signed on to the FreeCon statement. ...

Overall, the share of American imports covered by trade restrictions increased under Reagan from 8 percent in 1975 to 21 percent by 1984.


Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Michigan House, Senate, Governor's mansion, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Supreme Court all under Democrat control for first time since 1980s

This is what happens when you get 1.8 million votes by mail: a record turnout to surpass the 2018 record turnout.

For the first time in four decades, Democrats are waking up to a state in which their party controls the House and Senate – a feat not done since the early 1980s.

More.

It takes a special kind of stupid Republicanism to screw things up this bad: libertarian Republicanism, for which Michigan is famous.

The key: legislation by referendum of the people instead of by representative government; which yielded 1) easy voting by mail, instead of on election day, for which libertarians are all-in, as they are for abortion, immigration, and free-trade, same as Democrats; and 2) "nonpartisan" redistricting.

Michigan was never a conservative state, and is finished as a Republican state.

Michigan has been irretrievably Californicated in the span of four years.

Friday, May 21, 2021

Russell Kirk's "shop and till conservatives", a bunch of cheats


"But all these are trifles, if we consider the fraud and cozenage of trading men and shopkeepers."

-- Jonathan Swift

Thursday, January 28, 2021

Berman and Milanovic show increased "intersection between the top decile of capital-income recipients and labor-income earners" since Reagan 1986 tax reform has led to higher income inequality

Regrettably the study does not mention another factor, how free-trade, particularly with China and East Asia generally, helped drive wages in the US at the bottom ever lower. The Reagan era produced a perfect storm of screwed for the bottom half in America.

Here:

Where does homoploutia come from? The data do not allow us to determine that with certainty, but they allow to investigate what is consistent with individual hypotheses. There is strong evidence that increased wage-stretching that began around 1980 is associated with the rising homoploutia (the other alternatives that do not perform as well are rising inequality of capital incomes and rising capital share).

The link between higher inequality of labor incomes and homoploutia might have occurred in two ways. The first is that many high-earning individuals saved a large share of their wages, invested it, and after some years began receiving large capital incomes. The second is that many capital-rich people decided, perhaps because of changed social norms, or because top jobs became more lucrative as marginal tax rates were reduced, not to treat university education as “luxury consumption” but rather to use it to secure good jobs. It could be, of course, that both mechanisms were at work. 

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Does Carson Holloway for The Federalist even live in America 2020, torn by $2 billion in damages from rioting and looting?

 From his essay here:

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North: 

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.

You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.

Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be. 

If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.

We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey. 

Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.

Monday, January 27, 2020

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Free movement of peoples to the US will destroy it, same as free trade

Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities and renders the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.

-- Karl Marx, Appendix to Elend der Philosophie, 1847.

Monday, May 13, 2019

Labor's share of income nosedived in the '90s after NAFTA, briefly recovered and then tanked as globalization/China took over

Do you feel richer? Well do ya?

Employers call all the shots, and you get the crumbs from your masters' tables, if you are lucky. 

Stop voting for the free-traders and libertarian lunatics of the two major parties.


Sunday, March 31, 2019

The problem with this analysis, now standard, is that libertarianism co-opted conservatism

The three-legged stool of "conservatism" in the age of Reagan consisted of a libertarian leg, a social conservative leg, and a foreign policy hawk leg. The libertarian leg came to dominate (the money interest), as is typical, which discarded the conservative leg except when it needed it, at election time (traditional values agenda), and put the foreign policy leg to work in its interests (global free trade).

This has happened before. The proponents of the professional, managerial state in the early 20th century similarly co-opted the rural Christian farming population to pass the "progressive" agenda, in the name of Christian fairness, of women's suffrage, popular election of senators, the corporate and income taxes to make business and the rich pay their fair share, and Prohibition, in exchange for political power.

The gulls in this game have always been the core Christian population. They are being replaced now, however, by a new class, the Latinos.

The 3-D chess masters will have to run the future scenarios. Yo no hablo espanol. But I expect them to be less charitable when jilted.

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

President Kushner is a libertarian free-trade kook who wants no borders, no walls, NO ISRAEL AT ALL

#NotMyPresident

The guy is a lunatic.












"the goal is to eliminate the borders"

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Peggy Noonan is blind about conservatism

Republicans Need to Save Capitalism:

I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary, sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism.

Weary sighing acceptance? Try the eager jubilant over being given free reign to exploit man's fallen nature capitalism.

Reagan "conservatives" preached that the Reagan tax cuts and free-trade would usher in a period of investment at home, in a word, that if you just let people have more of their own money they'd know what to do with it and they would do the right thing.

They didn't.

"Conservatives" exported our jobs and invested abroad, creating middle classes in poor countries where there were none before, at the expense of the middle class at home. They drove the opening to China, enriched it and created a monster which now robs us blind and threatens world peace. The libertarians have sold China the rope the communists hope to hang us with.

If Republicans and conservatives had properly understood human nature they wouldn't have made this mistake. The doctrinaire among them showed themselves to be liberals, not conservatives, possessed of a foolish optimism based on the idea that people are basically good. They are not. People do what's best for number one, as they always have. Screw thy neighbor, and thy country if necessary. Are we not a nation of immigrants?

Only conservatism with its roots in the transcendent moral order has been able to curb this false individualism and mistaken enthusiasm. Both were routinely attacked in church in former days, but nobody seems to go there anymore, and when they do go the preacher turns out to have joined the wrong side.

The "conservative" rubes out there still believe this stupid myth of libertarianism, while the billionaire class of both parties which got rich off it only hopes they continue to do so.

They care about nothing but themselves and their right to privacy, the penumbra of our collective deviancy.

Sunday, November 25, 2018

The number of doofusses taking Hillary's recent immigration comments seriously is truly astounding

It's self-evident that Hillary's "new" view about immigration is nothing more than immigration reform as a means to an end, namely the center-left's election to power in order to defeat populism and the right.

Her response to the situation of her defeat is completely in keeping with Marx, who viewed the embrace of the free-trade doctrine of unalloyed capitalism as an accelerant for The Revolution. The important thing is not that the left is wrong about "late stage capitalism". The important thing is that they are insincere about what they say they believe in common with us. 

Yet everywhere I go otherwise sane people are talking shit about this. Ooh everyone's coming around to Trump's way of thinking, and so on.

Like Obama who lied about his own mother's health insurance in propounding Obamacare, Hillary will use anything and anyone to get where she wants to go.
 




Monday, August 20, 2018

China eating America's lunch for 25 years by following exactly the protectionist strategy free traders say will destroy US

Jeff Ferry here in USA Today says free traders can't explain China's success because their free trade ideology blinds them to how protectionism has made China great:

China has been eating America’s lunch for a quarter-century. And they’ve done it by following exactly the strategy that pundits and free traders now suggest will be destructive to the US economy. ... Unless Washington stands up to China now, the trajectory of the past 25 years points to a troubling, continued decline for America’s working families. And so, for those who suggest that tariffs are a mistake, they need merely look at China’s rise for an instructive rethink.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

The American Spectator singles out Michigan for its $16 billion in corporate welfare, but the cronyism trend is up 39% just in the top 10 states since 2015

The story is here, and is more than correct to state:

Unfortunately, crony capitalism is something both parties are willing to get behind. Part of the problem is that voters often approve of these subsidies when the phrase “bringing jobs to the state” is uttered.

We're more like China than we'd like to admit, where state-owned enterprise is the rule. We simply practice state-capitalism-lite.

The data is tracked comprehensively here, updated it appears through 2015. The last time I reported on this in 2015 the top ten crony states alone were up to $96 billion in corporate welfare handouts. Three years later the top 10's cronyism has grown to $133 billion, an increase of nearly 39%.

Free market capitalism this is not.