free trade

The prospect that the US president would conclude that tariffs cause growth has always been the downside of good economic numbers.

It was amusing, yesterday, to see the President of the United States with his counter-part from the EU, a Luxembourgian.

What do Democrats plan to do with the tariff economy they themselves helped create?

I am a retired musician. I play three instruments – but I sang, is what I mainly did. My first band in high school was big into three-part vocal harmonies. We covered a bunch of songs – and wrote a few – that featured this rousing sound.

When now-President Donald Trump first burst onto the political scene, one of the ways he made a name for himself was by ridiculing many of the trade deals the United States has spent the last several decades cutting.

An often forgotten truth is that it is not just military warfare that can cause injury to innocent bystanders, the same inescapable happens in economic warfare initiated by governments, as well. But in the latter case, the human “collateral damage” is a targeted victim.

We are in the midst of marking the centenary of the First World War, which was fought from 1914 to 1918.

Trump’s choice of Lighthizer is excellent personnel – to finally deliver us the vastly improved Chinese IP policy candidate Trump promised.

One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions.

As an educator and a patriot, my good friend and mentor, Elizabeth A. Clarke, wanted to make sure that upon her death in June of this year young people would carry on her fight for freedom and liberty, which Elizabeth continued up until the day before her death.

Listening to the presumptive Republican and Democratic candidates for the White House, the average voter would think that international trade and investment is a zero sum game in which there is a “winner” and a “loser.” Their economic policy assumption is that other countries are gaining at the international trade game at the expense of the United States.

Why have prices fallen so low? Because government subsidies created a glut – and the market is flooded. This government money warps and distorts the marketplace – as otherwise productively-directed time and effort is instead spent chasing the government coin. Producers produce not what the marketplace needs – but for what the government pays.

In something of a joke, President Barack Obama says Americans should actually read the Transpacific Partnership Agreement. The agreement itself consists of 30 chapters, with 144 annexes (43 of which are imbedded into specific chapters). Assuming the average American reads 200 pages a day, it would take a month. The length and complexity of the TPP Agreement signals that it is not fundamentally a free trade agreement, but is rather a managed trade agreement. As Obama has said, “I know that if you take a look at what’s actually in the TPP, you will see that this is, in fact, a new type of trade deal.”