President Donald Trump and Chairman Mao
I’ve never met Donald Trump nor had any dealings with him, and since I don’t watch television, I’d barely paid attention to his antics until his unexpectedly strong run for the White House began attracting heavy media coverage in 2015.
But some time ago I was privately meeting on other matters with one of Trump’s powerful and influential backers when Trump’s name happened to come up. Since I tend to be forthright and speak candidly about most things, I casually described him as an “ignorant buffoon.” I was hardly surprised that my interlocutor failed to reply to that provocative characterization, but I noticed the slightly embarrassed expression on his face and interpreted his silence as an admission that he quietly shared my own appraisal.
I strongly suspect that the worldwide tariff policies recently declared by Trump will soon cause more and more Americans, including erstwhile Trump supporters, to come to that same distressing conclusion.
Tariff policy is part of economics, and I hardly claim any great personal expertise in that discipline. Indeed, quite the contrary.
Back almost a dozen years ago, before my increasingly controversial writings rendered me far too radioactive for such things, I was invited to participate in a televised NYC debate on the economics of immigration policy, with one of my opponents being the prominent libertarian economist Bryan Caplan of George Mason University. The show was syndicated around the country and simulcast on NPR, and early on I boldly admitted my total ignorance of economics, declaring that not only had I never taken a class in that subject, but I had never even opened the pages of a single economics textbook.
However, I also suggested that much of economics constituted basic common sense and perhaps partly as a consequence of that approach, our side won the debate by the widest margin in the history of that series, with one of the opposing team members even shifting towards our position.
- Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words
Yet that minor legalistic technicality barely scraped the surface of the very bizarre tariff rates that Trump had decided to impose against the 150-odd other countries of the world.
For example, our factually-challenged president declared that his new tariff rates were “retaliatory” and indeed the first column of the chart he displayed showed the foreign tariffs that had allegedly provoked his retaliation, but everyone quickly noticed that these figures were total nonsense. Switzerland hardly imposes a 61% tariff on American goods, nor does Vietnam maintain a 90% tariff rate against our products.
Instead these figures were merely calculated using a formula based upon America’s existing trade deficit in goods, which was something entirely different. So if another country sold us more goods than they themselves bought, that was described as due to a tariff even if no such tariff actually existed. In a perfect example of this absurdity, Trump incorrectly claimed that the penguins of Norfolk Island
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
