“As for those “bad ideas” the Kochs have, they’re the reason for whatever governing success Mr. Trump has had so far. Pro-growth cuts in tax rates, deregulation and originalist judges have been the most successful parts of the Trump agenda. And they were Koch beliefs when Mr. Trump was still donating to Bill and Hillary Clinton. The President gets credit for winning the election and making the policies happen, but the Kochs also gave his agenda major support over the last two years. Contrast that success to Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, which has gone nowhere in Congress; his ill-thought border enforcement that ended up in the debacle of family separation; and the tariff assault that has so far raised costs for U.S. consumers and producers without any compensating trade opening. Whose ideas are the “bad” ones?”
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Samizdata quote of the dayAugust 1st, 2018 |
 26 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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What seems to have gone un-noticed is that South Africa is set to change the Constitutution to allow the expropriation of land without compensation: and that will be that – hallo Zimbabwe.
Ok Wall Street Journal, Koch brothers and NeverTrumpers.
So, now you stop supporting Republican candidates (some of them) which means – you prefer a Democrat dominated Congress. Fine, that will surely advance the Koch agenda of a free economy, smaller state and more freedom. Yes!
Also to the Koch brothers: do some reckoning concerning your life time dedication to these noble goals of freedom: what has your billion dollar and decades long effort achieved? Has freedom advanced in the US in the last 3 decades (since Reagan)? It has only retreated, steadily.
Purity of intentions is never sufficient.
“his ill-thought border enforcement that ended up in the debacle of family separation;” What “debacle”? Fake news!
None of this pre-adolescent NeverTrump bleating-and-squeaking has the slightest relevance. In contrast to your standard-issue Rat ideologue, ye auld Koch brothers may appear relatively functional, but their decades-long Wall Street vs. Main Street orientation speaks for itself. (And why not?– no-one makes billions dragging sidewalk sales.)
Spare us the “made-in-Kochland Trump agenda” nonsense. After eighteen months, on a performance basis Trump tentatively ranks fourth of all U.S. Presidents (not double-counting Cleveland), between Jefferson (third) and Andrew Jackson (fourth, for all his faults).
Come 2024, this hail-to-the-Koches paradigm, which attributes absolutely anything positive done by this Administration to some a-sinistra Goldman-Morgan puppeteer offstage, will be as embarrassing as John Calhoun’s defense of his Old South’s “peculiar institution” throughout the 1840s.
What Lincoln called “slavery” then, Trump calls Marxisants’ purposeful economic destruction now. Think Benedict Barack Gangrenous with his “you didn’t build that” mantra– what he and his sadsack ilk did build is called “Detroit”.
Since Jackson himself, every exceptionally effective U.S. President from Lincoln to TR, Truman, Reagan –yes, Wilson, FDR, and LBJ rank orders-of-magnitude below– has been socially unacceptable in gentry-sodden circles. Faugh!
Contrary to the comments here so far, I’d say that freedom continued to advance in the US after Reagan, on social as well as some economic issues, and it is only really with Bush W, and Obama that things have gone into serious reverse on a number of fronts, so I doubt the Koch brothers regard their efforts as wasted.
And protectionism – which involves taxing tens of millions of citizens and forcing them to pay more for all kinds of items and services, is a “main street” as well as a “Wall Street” issue. Anyone who takes liberty seriously should regard protectionism of the sort that Trump is after with alarm. (It is also, as an aside, why I want the UK to leave the protectionist customs union of the EU and go for free trade, pure and simple.)
And Trump appears to be oblivious to the spiraling level of US debt, just as some of his immediate predecessors are. Perhaps his cheerleaders might enlighten us as to what he is going to do about that. At least the Koch brothers, via their various think tanks, focus on this issue and keep the case for classical liberal ideas in focus. And as the article says, it is the issues where they have promoted ideas that have been accepted in the White House, (judges, deregulation, etc), that the Trump administration has been its best, while the issues of immigration and protectionism in particular have shown it at its worst.
Here is a trump tweet:
Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump
The European Union is coming to Washington tomorrow to negotiate a deal on Trade. I have an idea for them. Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!
Trump is correct that the other players (EU, China) are more protectionist than the US, and the intent and outcome of his trade policy needs to be judged by the end results… (not yet in).
Come 2024, this hail-to-the-Koches paradigm, which attributes absolutely anything positive done by this Administration to some a-sinistra Goldman-Morgan puppeteer offstage, will be as embarrassing as John Calhoun’s defense of his Old South’s “peculiar institution” throughout the 1840s.
If you calmed your fever, and read the article, you would note that it said that Trump does indeed deserve credit for enacting certain measures but that the inspiration for them did not start with him.
The “puppeteer” stuff is a joke: the Kochs have been pretty open and above-board about the way they try to push a pro-market agenda. The parallel with Calhoun is so absurd as to be not worth detaining ourselves over.
Truly, the Trumpaloompas are a strange lot.
Trump did not say that all their ideas are bad, he said that their specific ideas on these specific issues (trade, and probably also immigration) are wrong. Both these opposing positions are certainly debatable – but instead of debating them, the quotation seems to engage in straw-man arguments. Sad!
” while the issues of immigration”
That’s, to say the least, a controversial issue.
Total free immigration and a border-less world are unrealistic ideals.
One of the main reasons (or THE main reason) of the Brexit vote was the desire to control national borders and immigration.
Trump made immigration his main issue. He is more right than wrong on this count too.
I doubt the Koch brothers or other libertarians are advocates of open borders. Many are not.
To criticize Trump on immigration is to adopt the hypocrite Democrat stance. No Democrat has openly declared for free borders. That would be political suicide. They only favor open borders to criticize Trump.
Yep, we belong to this weird type of personality of people who are actually willing to take ‘yes’ for an answer from an unexpected* source, even if we are not getting everything we asked for (*some of us didn’t vote for Trump).
No, it has not only retreated. ‘Lesser evil’ voting slows the rate at which your enemies win, which is also why I know quite a few Tories who will stay at home and acquiesce to a Corbyn victory rather than support Theresa May if she has not been deposed before the next election. Corbyn will be a national calamity, but I am not convinced they are wrong to let it happen (even though I have much to lose personally).
That is the narrative many are pushing (particularly on the left) but the Ashcroft poll suggested that was a distant second as to why people voted LEAVE.
1. He’s going to keep Hillary Clinton from being president for at least four years, and maybe eight years. Imagine where we’d be today had she won – a more strangled economy with even higher government spending.
2. Since his tax cut, tax receipts are up dramatically because of the strength of the economy, helping to control the deficit.
3. Exactly what else do you think Trump could possibly do to drop government spending at this point, given the House’s and the Senate’s unwillingness to touch entitlement spending? President isn’t king. He can do quite a bit with executive orders, but slowing government spending drastically isn’t one of them.
If you used non-paywall articles for your OP, we might do that.
The Koch Brothers have been good for the Right in America for some time, but they have been charter members of the never-Trump, William Kristol arm of the Party. The idea that we should whine and sit out the election because we didn’t get our #1 choice as a candidate is childish. Enjoy Corbyn, and let’s try to figure out later how many decades it takes you to recover from the socialist damage he does to your country. Myself, I’d prefer a weak conservative who barely keeps us in place over a socialist who “teaches the voters a lesson” and hopefully creates a future backlash.
I can’t tell if it is true misunderstanding, or dishonesty, that keeps alive the argument that “tariffs are a drain and thus ought not be.”
No one is arguing that they’re not a drain. No one wants tariffs simply for the income stream they provide.
Tariffs are useful for their coercive effect only. You impose tariffs as a way of saying “I know these will hurt us, but they’ll hurt you more, so change X behavior and we’ll drop the tariffs. We can afford the hit from tariffs longer than you.”
No one goes to war because war in and of itself is good – we do it because by going to war we hope to change the behavior of another nation. Tariffs, like war, will hurt us, but we bet that they will hurt “them” more, and so make them alter their course. Had we made the decisions concerning entering WWII on the same basis that you seemingly want to use as the basis for the imposition of tariffs, we’d have stayed out. As it was, we decided that the coercive effects upon the Axis of our entering the war justified the economic and social drag the war would have on us.
And I remain amazed that the same people who want to drop out and let Corbyn win – because of the coercive effects such a move would have in “teaching a lesson to the dumb voters” – can argue the opposite in regard to tariffs. Are you dropping out because Corbyn would be good for your economy and society? Or are you dropping out in order to teach a lesson, even though that lesson will initially be costly to your economy and society?
If you can assume that my defense of Trump’s tariffs stems from my love of tariffs, then I can assume that your dropping out and letting Corbyn win stems from your love of Corbyn. They’re the exact same impulse at heart.
This quote will not age well.
“Total free immigration and a border-less world are unrealistic ideals.”
Pursued as a serious objective, I think they might be an interesting policy possibility, not necessarily unrealistic except in the usual way that libertarian policies are hard to implement within the modern established political world; i.e. “unrealistic” in the same sense as doing away with zoning, or allowing free banking, or making government medical licensing advisory rather than mandatory. But that’s almost beside the point, because in practice essentially no one with power pursues those as idealistic goals. Instead, they merely appeal to those ideals selectively as a stalking horse for a rather different agenda. Basically, the immigration policies which are justified with universalist rhetoric are to actual universalist ideals as the permit Raj is to free trade, “opening up to trade is good” being used to justify a policy of specifically doling out narrow trade permits as favors. Or, for that matter, the actual immigration policies are to the universalist ideals which supposedly justify them as the actual US affirmative action policies are to the universalist ideals and more-effective-institutions claims which are invoked to justify them.
There are two main themes of establishment immigration policy: first, sharply enforcing indenture-like limited immigration for skilled people (H1B, e.g.) specifically assigned to employers who play the game, and second, making curiously specific application of supposed general principles about how it’s terrible to enforce limits on immigration … which turn out to mean specifically that it’s terrible to enforce limits on less-skilled underclass-ish people. (Commonly: therefore we must specifically legalize those who have already entered the country illegally and made a living in the underground economy, or specifically legalize various groups very broadly defined as refugees.)
It looks very much like cynically collecting political favors (on the business/H1B side) and cynically electing a new population of client voters (on the amnesty/”refugee” side), and very little like applying any universalist ideal.
William Newman @August 1, 2018 at 6:44 pm:
Do not underestimate the ideological fixation of the Left (especially the far Left) on this issue. The outright Communist left (Workers World Party, Revolutionary Communist Party) have included “open borders” rhetoric in their propaganda for many years. The SJW Left sees mass immigration as a tool to destroy “White” society, not merely win elections. And a large fraction of the intellectual Left are Jews, who have (for understandable historical reasons) a reflexive hostility to any sort of immigration restriction or enforcement. There’s a huge amount of “Ellis Island nostalgia” out there.
Tariffs are useful for their coercive effect only.
And how effective have they been? Given that Trump regards trade as “unfair” often as not because evil foreigners are selling people cheap stuff, the definition he has of “dumping” etc goes pretty wide. And the evidence for how tariffs work in coercing other countries to reduce tariffs is not particularly strong. It would be good to see some evidence, because I haven’t done so.
It is also worth reiterating Milton Friedman’s point that tariffs, even if they are unevenly applied, hurt the protectionist country more than the free trader side, not least by piling costs on the shoulders of those who tend not to have a loud voice in Congress or wherever. Several people on this blog have talked disparagingly about the Kochs for their skills in finance and real estate (as if this is a bad thing: check, this is a classical liberal blog, not yet another socialistic page where people denounce “evil bankers”, for fuck’s sake) but miss that with tariffs, the main victims of said are poor people who have to pay more than otherwise for basics such as food, and intermediate small manufacturers who see their input costs rise.
When Bush II slapped tariffs on steel in the early years of his term, they were eventually rescinded because of the damage done to the domestic economy, including manufacturing.
Look, I realise that Trump is a deal-making genius too clever for we free market geeks, but the cleverness of his move on trade is a mystery to me, and frankly, to anyone who has tracked the world of international trade down the years.
It appears so far that Trump’s approach to trade negotiation – of which threats of tariffs are one component – will yield either a new NAFTA that is less onerous for us, or separate agreements with Mexico and Canada that, again, are less onerous for us.
Just a few days ago, I remember a press conference in which President Trump and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker announced some agreements on trade between the U.S. and the European Union. I’ll quote Trump briefly:
I’d have to assume from this that Trump isn’t imposing tariffs because he desires tariffs, but because they are a tool for working towards the more desirable tariff-free trade deal. I’d also have to assume that the EU is backing down on some of its stridency because it wishes to avoid a trade war – which is exactly the designed coercive effect of tariffs.
Which leaves China. Tariffs are certainly risky against China. But Trump’s approach is no more risky than most of the approaches to China taken before his. We’ll see what happens there, but based on his results so far, I won’t bet against him.
It must be hard, having to constantly deal with us fucking idiots, eh? But, frankly, the people who have “tracked the world of international trade down the years” haven’t served us all that well. I remember being horrified when I learned that Trump was going to run for the presidency. I still don’t view him as any extraordinary genius. But he appears to have been the right guy for the job at this particular time in history. Call him a buffoon if you wish, but maybe the world needed a buffoon in this job right now to counteract what the “right people” have managed to screw up.
I found Ilana Mercer’s book “The Trump Revolution – The Donald’s Creative destruction deconstructed” (published June 29, 1916, before he was elected) quite interesting. She’s a veteran, credentialed, libertarian. A little too enthusiastic, but interesting.
And – if, like Perry, one considers that some destruction of the deep state (current state) is needed, Trump sure is working on it. It is possible that in the end we will be disappointed (as we were with Reagan), but it was worth giving it a try.
Rick Rostrom, that nostalgia was not nearly so vocal back when highly qualified politically anxious refugees were free for the taking as the Hong Kong lease expired. And more recently, I went to a bar mitzvah last year, and the synagogue had a sizable sign outside with welcome-immigrants messages in IIRC three languages — Spanish, Arabic, and one other that I don’t remember. But no East Asian or South Asian languages. And it was in a university town, so lack of familiarity with how East Asians and South Asians get shafted was probably not the explanation.
And consider the comparison to AA. There is not only Ellis Island nostalgia among Jews, but self-righteous grouchiness among Jews about how there used to be anti-Jewish discrimination in academia approximately severe as the anti-Asian discrimination today. But I haven’t noticed much self-examination about how, because no one knew then what we now know about how diversity is much more important than academic merit, and so we didn’t have any systematic determination of which high-achieving ethnic groups are diverse and which are undiverse, it was only a weird sort of blind luck that made the discrimination wrong. They happened to discriminate against Jews, who we now know are diverse, but no one that I am aware of knew that then, so as far as they could tell, they might have been discriminating against an undiverse group like East Asians, which we now know would be wise and good. So damn them, of course, damn them, the vile racists, for discriminating against a diverse ethnic group … but it does seem at least a little ethically puzzling how best to do so when there is no possible way for them to have known right as rightthinking people now understand it from wrong as rightthinking people now understand it before that little remark about diversity in a Supreme Court AA opinion snowballed into the Emperor’s New Clothes cultural phenomenon (Harvard bragging about Warren’s diversity…) that we have today.
It appears to me that any Ellis Island nostalgia, like grouchiness about an incumbent successful ethnic group excluding an increasingly successful new ethnic group (back when it was WASPs excluding Jews), is much more strongly felt when it can be felt in service of agendas like commoditizing the complement (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/) of the existing successful Jewish population than when it can be felt for groups whose experience more closely parallels the Jewish experience, i.e., groups seen not as complements but more nearly rivals. I.e., a specifically Jewish variation on the general theme that “in practice essentially no one with power pursues those as idealistic goals. Instead, they merely appeal to those ideals selectively as a stalking horse for a rather different agenda.”
FWIW, I largely agree with bobby b’s points about about trade and tariffs. @Johnatan’s point seems rather unfair:
And how effective have they been?
They have only been in place a couple of weeks. Already they have had some effect, but, I mean, give it a chance to work. The President is absolutely correct in saying that some of these trade deals are outrageously unfair, and who can be surprised when they are negotiated by some of the professional politicians we have had in the past, people whose incentives have been utterly out of whack.
The best trade deal is one sentence “We agree not to impose tariffs or prevent your companies access to our markets, and in exchange you will do the same.” However, instead trade deals are thousands of pages of impenetrable legalese. Trump has indicated that the first trade deal is his preference. In the meantime though reality bites and we have to tweak the impenetrable legalese.
I am reminded of this scene from Bond, as the best Bond girl, Miranda Frost, describes James Bond. Here
And also this article that really captures very accurately my feelings about the President. Quoting from this article:
Millions of Americans remain repulsed with the Washington status quo and find its return so perilous that they prefer the human embodiment of nitroglycerin in the White House, even with its attendant collateral damage, rather than taste again the malignant gruel Washington was serving them. They judge that the explosive ingredient in dynamite is safer than the stew of venomous elitism that fed the decline of their country. Trump’s steadfast support is an appraisal: It measures how America feels about Washington, D.C.
The Kristol’s and CNN complain about his uncouthness, his stupidity, how he isn’t presidential, how he is breaking all the traditions and molds of prior presidents. And while saying all that they miss the irony, which is that is EXACTLY the point of Trump. The plain fact is that, whether our rebuilding the world from the Marshall plan, or wanted to get China out of isolation into trade, the USA has taken hit after hit in unfair trade deals. That is that status quo. I agree with the President. A political hand grenade is what is necessary. Would I have preferred Ron Paul? Sure. But I’d prefer to be ripped and rich too. However, in the meantime I’ll take the best I can get.
As bobby and Fraser say. I’ll add only this: out of every $1000 that I make this year, $200 will be tax free. Before deductions, etc. That’s not nothing.
Fraser, I am hardly being unfair in my dusty take on tariffs: I am going on the basis that, as with the steel tariffs of Bush W, they did more harm than good to the US economy. If we are now reduced to saying that slapping big tariffs on billions of foreign exports is part of some subtle game of geopolitical ju-jitsu, the onus is on those to point to examples of where this has delivered an overall improvement in the free market in the past, etc. And I haven’t seen such cases (there may some, so I’d genuinely appreciate links on this).
For example, Mr Trump has reportedly promised $12 billion in agriculture aid to help farmers affected by the tariff situation. That does not seem very smart to me.
Even on the specific, and entirely valid, complaint that China has routinely stolen intellectual property from the West, an obvious response is to state that we will respond in kind with Chinese IP. China is now filing a lot of patents. We can give them a taste of their own medicine. We can turn the screws on China on this specific sort of area, but no need to impose tariffs that will, in the main, hit ordinary citizens at home the hardest.
“The Kristol’s and CNN complain about his uncouthness, his stupidity, how he isn’t presidential”
Previous conservative “Gentlemen” have folded like $2 deck chairs at the first “racism” accusation; the only choice was a thick skinned “barbarian”.