You need better sources, maybe less Democrat propagandists, and more straight news reporters.
Something about your NY Times link yesterday about the Mueller “firing” was bothering me. And then I remembered what it was and why, Maggie Haberman, the Dems favorite narrative changer.
Debra, It is the Trumpian base that is dragging the rest of the party into amorality. Check the poll referenced in the article. The young and the college educated are the remaining beacons of light.
Young people rarely parrot. Most will immediately reach for their phones to verify and double check. In that way they are far more difficult to mislead than those who watch cable news and read like minded blogs/papers ie an echo chamber.
But what young people are quick to jump on is hypocrisy. When evangelical leaders are quick to give Trump a mulligan, this is duly noted by the young.
The young and educated are going to give us some version of Bernie Sanders if Trump is unsuccessful in stabilizing opportunities for working people and others who have fallen through the cracks created by globalism. These problems are largely ignored by establishment Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile Republicans seem content to manufacture morality claims to prop up irresponsible policies and a grotesque lack of business ethics.
Michelle, It was interesting to compare French’s Christian response to Falwell with Goldberg’s response. I was pleased that Goldberg seemed to appreciate what French had to say.
HRW, Texas young people seem to have a lot in common with Canadian young people.
Debra, I have talked to a number of young people who are thinking outside the box about healthcare. Some like Sanders’ ideas. Others are libertarian in their approach. All agree that something has to change.
The virtue of young people remains to be seen. Responses to some poll or other are convincing of nothing, and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical they (young people) have it any more together than every other pathetic generation wandering the globe today or whenever.
GenX are a different breed from millenials (in general). They’ve observed the mishmash of education not leading to a job that the millenials have gone through and are a little more careful about the use of their time and what college is good for.
Regarding the article @ 4:02, What Friedman argues for is unfettered free trade, but he does not attempt to make a moral argument for free trade; apparently he cannot. And the economic arguments he uses are weak.
When he comes up against strong, legitimate, and long-standing arguments against unfettered free trade, he either blows them off entirely (“This argument has no validity whatsoever, either in principle or in practice.”) or obfuscates with roundabout verbiage that ends up ignoring the problem altogether (“What do high and low wages mean?”) .
Like other articles of its kind, Friedman, promotes the supposed voice of the disembodied ‘consumer’ as the ultimate decider of what is good. If the man is not a moral pygmy, there is no sign of it in the article.
At the low end of the scale, helping the consumer means people don’t go to bed hungry or cold. Friedman’s teachings have been put in place around the world since he and Rose wrote this article. Over a billion people have been raised out of extreme poverty. Fewer children are starving. There is your moral component.
At the high end (in the US) tariffs and import quotas help some people and hurt others. The new tariff on washers may help Maytag shareholders and workers by raising prices, but people other than consumers are also hurt. Families forced to pay more for washers won’t have money to buy a toaster (or some other product) and won’t be able to eat out once a week. So the toaster company shareholders and workers are losers as is the waitress and the cook who lost their jobs. Friedman has proven that for every dollar you give to the Maytag shareholders and workers, you have to take more than a dollar from the toaster workers, the waitress and the cook. You are taking dollars from one group to be able to give quarters to another group. To me that is not just immoral, it is dumb.
Unfettered trade is immoral just as other behaviors unregulated by virtue are immoral. Trade does not magically make bad behavior moral. Taking care of your country and allowing people to work for a living is hardly dumb. Providing companies with incentives to remove those jobs and open them in other countries is pretty much a definition of economic, political, and moral stupidity. And because of this, when the young and educated come into their own, some Bernie Sanders type will find the country ripe for the plucking. It’s foolish to let it get to that point…but that is where unfettered trade, and the materialistic, consumptive hedonism that it relies upon and produces finally ends.
The people who have promoted this reckless behavior in government and from the pulpits have lost their moral authority. It is ironic that they do not see that they have been the Franklin Grahams handing out mulligans for bad behavior in business for the past 40 years.
Did you follow my argument? My tutoring skills must be quickly eroding. Tariffs and trade quotas hurt some Americans just as they help some Americans. Friedman and scores of other economists (it is basically undisputed) have proven that the total dollar value of the harm to those harmed by tariffs exceeds the total dollar value of the benefit to those helped by those same tariffs. That is what makes tariffs dumb. Talking about “taking care of your country” and “allowing people to work” is just repeating demagogic slogans and doesn’t in any way address the issue. Friedman and the other economists have shown that the lack of tariffs allows the people of a country to produce a higher value of goods and services and therefore earn more money. Educated leaders of countries promote free trade to “take care of their countries” and enrich their people.
This issue is not intuitive. It requires study. However, the vast majority of those who have studied the issue (primarily economists, but also tens of millions of their students and the overwhelming majority of world leaders) do not disagree with one another.
Douthat wrote an interesting argument about immigration. He primarily chides the left for their treatment of White House aide Stephen Miller. He also made a good case for something like Trump’s new immigration plan. I guess that both sides will hate the article since they hated the plan.
We probably could have figured out that something like this happened. One of Trump’s lawyers told Trump that top officials of the FBI needed to be discredited, so Trump unleashed his gang of nitwits and sycophants against public servants trying to do their jobs. It is the most shameful behavior by Republicans in my lifetime.
So the real scandal = Trump and his allies engaged in witness tampering & career & character assassination of 3 lifelong public servants because they could corroborate comey’s account. Every member of the gop secret loon society owes these men an apology. https://t.co/nFetrYkEAj
Lol. Ricky, what you lack in tutoring skills, you make up in your ability to parrot your idols. But seriously, international economics has nothing of substance to say to internal distribution of income. And when you have half of your country experiencing economic distress while the other half gloats, it doesn’t take an economist to see where the next generation is going to take us. But that’s ok. What can’t be changed must be endured. I will leave you to the gossip you so obviously prefer over serious thought.
;–)
Debra, You have hit on something. You are focused on how the pie is divided while I am focused on growing a bigger pie. However, there is no evidence that tariffs produce a more equitable division of the pie. They simply shrink the pie. If your goal is a reduction in consumption, protectionism works. It will make people poorer. Children are starving again in Venezuela.
Douthat’s Twitter feed is the place to be right now. He is responding to leftist critics of his article posted above.
And when your enemy has just made an offer that has infuriated (for real) a number of his own allies, that's a good time to think creatively about counter-offers, doomed as they may be. The belief that moral purity precludes them is part of the doom spiral of polarization.
“While the Democratic Party press tries to pump life into Bob Mueller’s going-nowhere-fast Russia investigation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley continues to burrow into the real scandal: the corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI by Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yesterday he and Lindsey Graham sent letters to the Democratic National Committee, Hillary for America (HFA), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former DNC Chairman Donna Brazile, HFA Chairman John Podesta, and HFA’s Chief Strategist, Joel Benenson. These letters request documents and information about the individuals’ and organizations’ relationship to the Fusion GPS fake dossier on Donald Trump.”
____________________________
“Grassley and Graham request responses to these questions by February 8. They are, obviously, good questions, but there is no way they will be answered. The DNC and the other parties to whom they were sent will stonewall, evade, obfuscate and lie. Congressional investigations are pretty much useless, not because the investigators are incompetent–they generally aren’t–but because they have no realistic way to compel truthful responses. Serving interrogatories and document requests in litigation, which is essentially what Grassley is doing here, works because the rules of civil procedure compel parties to respond, and a judge presides over every civil lawsuit. If a party refuses to answer, provides evasive and inadequate responses, or lies, the judge can impose a variety of meaningful sanctions.
Here, we simply have a letter requesting information. The Democrats to whom it is addressed will either ignore it, respond in risibly inadequate fashion, or lie. And there probably isn’t anything the Senate Judiciary Committee can do about it. Still, it is good to see that Grassley and Graham are at least trying to get at the truth with regard to what shapes up as the biggest scandal in American political history.”
——————————
“The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.
There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?
The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.
The Justice Department has identified about 50,000 Strzok-Page texts. But that is apart from the texts between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 that were declared missing a week ago but are now being recovered. So, the total is apparently 50,000 plus the currently unknown number of formerly missing texts.
But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn’t discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress.
How many texts have been turned over? Both Justice Department and Capitol Hill sources say the total number is in the 7,000 range, which includes all the texts handed over on two separate occasions.
How many texts will be turned over? First, it’s not possible to know how many texts from the Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 time period will be recovered and turned over. But of the 50,000 the Justice Department already has in hand, officials say they have already turned over all they’re going to give to Congress.
That means Justice has decided to allow Congress to see just 7,000 of a total of 50,000 Strzok-Page texts – slightly less than 15 percent of the total number of texts the Justice Department has now. Why is that? Justice Department officials point to a Jan. 19 letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to Capitol Hill investigators explaining which texts would and would not be turned over.
“The department is not providing text messages that were purely personal in nature,” Boyd wrote. “Furthermore, the department has redacted from some work-related text messages portions that were purely personal. The department’s aim in withholding purely personal text messages and redacting personal portions of work-related text messages was primarily to facilitate the committee’s access to potentially relevant text messages without having to cull through large quantities of material unrelated to either the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server or the investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
Finally – and this could be significant or not – Boyd said that “in a few instances,” the Justice Department consulted with the office of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller and made some redactions “related to the structure, operation, and substance of the [Special Counsel’s Office]’s investigation because it is ongoing.” Hill investigators don’t really know what that covers. (The letter said if Congress has questions about redactions in a particular text, the department would “work with” Congress to further describe or reveal redacted information “in a closed setting.”)
The bottom line is that the Justice Department has turned over a fairly small percentage of the Strzok-Page texts. Even assuming many of the texts would be personal – the two were having an extramarital affair, after all – some Hill investigators wonder whether roughly 43,000 of the 50,000 known texts were wholly personal.”
We say we need regulations (or tariffs or whatever) because people are greedy and sinful, and need to be reeled in. So, who makes those laws and regulations? Other people – who are also sinful and greedy. That’s why we end up with crony capitalism or corporatism rather than actual free market capitalism. And then people blame the real thing for the results of the corrupted thing.
I have libertarian friends who insist that things would be better for everyone if we had the real thing (free market capitalism without regulations, or without many, at least). They point to the guilds that craftsmen had (still have?) that were a voluntary way of regulating their trades. Today, with the internet, if a company abuses its employees or cheats its customers, people are going to find out about it and boycott that business. Theoretically, there would be enough jobs, because more people could afford to own their own businesses, that companies would have to offer good wages, benefits, and working conditions to keep good employees.
I don’t know how true all that is,and I do have some reservations about the whole theory, but I do agree with the point about how we trust people we probably can’t trust to regulate other people we think we can’t trust.
Libertarian thinking seems as idealistic and utopian as Marxist thinking to me. It’s hard to pay your bills with theoretical jobs. But it will work out in the end for Believers. And in the meantime, those bright beacons—the young and educated—will soon be in the driver’s seat. I doubt they are going to fall for unfettered anything, but if truth be told, they didn’t give us abortion on demand, rampant materialism, and no-fault divorce, so I’m inclined to think they are entitled to make their own mistakes. Can’t be much worse than ours. ;–)
I was thinking about the young and jobs yesterday. I know about 100 20-somethings. Some are my son’s friends. Some I coached in basketball. Many I taught in Sunday School. Some fall in all three categories. I don’t know of any who are unemployed. I don’t even know of any who have been unemployed for any length of time. The ones with good degrees (engineering, nursing, accounting, computer science, etc) had it the easiest. They went straight from college into good-paying jobs. The ones with bad degrees have had to hustle more, but they quickly found good jobs and most had worked during college. The ones with no college degree have really had to hustle, but that is what they have done – working in the oil fields or learning a trade or starting a business, often working two jobs and/or long hours until they got established.
Maybe we have a work culture here in Texas.
Maybe we need to thank Rick Perry who was our governor from 2000-2012. Maybe we just need to thank God for all the blessings he has given us, even if they are Yankees spending their 401ks or Mexicans doing most of the hard work.
Kizzie, to answer your point in your first paragraph about mere humans making the laws and regulations, I would reply, not from a political or economic ideology, but from a theological standpoint, that government is the tool ordained of God to reign in humanity’s evil tendencies until the return of Christ. Paul made his statement in Romans 13 when Nero was in power, a man so morally bankrupt and impoverished in his ability to rule that his own governors revolted against him, the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy, and he committed suicide. Yet, Paul survived the plot of the Jews against him by appealing to Nero, and he later wrote in Philippians that some of Nero’s household had come to Christ; and it is in that kind of political climate that both Paul and Peter wrote that governments existed to protect the innocent and punish the evil (I Peter 2:13-17).
The implication would seem to be that any government is better than no government at all. Indeed, in places, such as Somalia or Libya or Afghanistan, where the government is limited to certain pockets and anarchy has descended outside those pockets, it is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, with horrific consequences for the average person. Corporations will not act to protect the public, unless it is in their own interests, which it seldom is – every year, a medical team from a nearby community here goes down to an area of Guatemala where most of the people are employed, at very low wages, by a certain soft drink manufacturer. The community lacks a clean water supply, so they drink the cheap soft drink, which rots their teeth, and raises the rate of diabetes and other conditions related to the physical effects of the excessive consumption of soft drinks. Yet, despite this and many other examples of how corporations seek profit first and ignore morality, we have in the West an interesting situation in which, although the government has legal limits of how much it can interfere in the lives of citizens, yet unlimited surveillance is in the hands of corporations who use it for their business interests.
It was Adam Smith, who doubted humanity had fallen and questioned the existence of God, who first marketed the idea that markets would regulate themselves. As with many ideologies of the Enlightenment era, it sounded good but was built on a false assumption of humanity; something which even Adam Smith seemed to acknowledge when he saw the effects of the market driven slave trade in the West Indies. Right now in Libya, there are slave auctions, because the business of buying and selling still goes on and gets on better when there is no government to interfere.
Another reason for tariffs is national security. If steel, for example, or other precious minerals, food etc. are not available in our country during wartime, we would be in a world of hurt. Such items are not easily produced in an emergency. The infrastructure has to have been in place.
Kathaleena, Good point. National security was the first of the three potentially valid arguments for tariffs listed by the Friedmans in the article @ 4:02 yesterday. It was the first argument my father always made. When the Friedmans wrote of a potentially less expensive method of dealing with such national security needs, I assume they were referring to a strategic reserve of certain items like the strategic petroleum reserve that we established at a time when our oil and gas production was down and we relied heavily on oil from the Middle East.
It would be very interesting to see a list of the items that Pentagon planners would now like to see in place. I assume they would not plan on converting all the car plants to plane and tank plants as was done in World War II, but who knows?
Unlike some of the more stalwart libertarians, I am not against government altogether, but do believe in a smaller government. I’m also in favor of a safety net for the needy. (From what I have learned, libertarians seem to fall on a spectrum, from no government to some-but-not-too-much government, including some regulations and a safety net.)
Certain verses about government have puzzled me. Roscuro brought up 1 Peter 2:13-14, which says:
“Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.”
Then there is Romans 13:3 :
“For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same.”
Yet, even when these verses were written, it was dangerous to be a Christian. Still today, it is against the law in many countries to be a Christian or to evangelize or hold a Bible study in one’s home. IOW, there was, and is, reason to fear the authority of their governments.
So I wonder if there is some other meaning, other interpretation of those verses. Have we misunderstood them?
The argument could be made that we are not supposed to fear anything anyway, so of course we shouldn’t fear a government that may persecute us. But that is not what the verses are saying.
My first sentence there looks like I am including myself among libertarians. Although I think they have ideas worth considering, and even lean towards libertarianism somewhat, I cannot say I am an actual libertarian.
No, Kizzie, we haven’t misunderstood that. Justin Martyr, in his appeal to Caesar and the Roman Senate (c. 150 A.D.), during the reign of Antonius Pius, when it was illegal to be a Christian, pleaded the case of the Christians based on those very words of Paul and Peter. He pointed out that Christians obeyed the laws, and paid their taxes, and pleaded that Christians be judged by their actions, not by their religion. But he noted in his appeal that if the Roman authorities didn’t listen, the Christians would suffer no loss, and the rulers would be held accountable for their actions by God. The anonymous writer of the epistle to Diognetus (c. 120 A.D.) said much the same thing, that Christians took care to do no evil, did good to everyone, yet were persecuted by all. As followers of Christ, we are to expect persecution. But, if you look at the cases of persecution that occur, very often it isn’t the government who is actively persecuting Christians – in many countries which officially recognize freedom of religion, but one religion is dominant, it is often the local community or even more commonly, one’s family who persecutes a convert to Christianity. Pastor A and his wife were missionaries to Somalia many decades ago, and they recalled one convert who had been at first ostracized by his family, and then ostensibly forgiven by them, but when he returned home, he was poisoned by them. The man was a martyr, but not by government officials. Even in places like Pakistan or Nigeria, when you read of the deaths of Christians, it is usually local mobs or rebel groups, not the government doing it – to date, no one has actually been executed under Pakistan’s blasphemy law, but Christians have been killed by mobs or assassinated. It was a similar case in the Roman Empire – there were periods of outbreaks of official persecution by the government, but often the persecution was provoked by personal and local resentment towards the Christians. Just look at the book of Acts and see how many times it was the Jews or local business men who felt they were threatened by the Christians who provoke the persecution. Honouring authorities who unjustly persecute us is merely walking in the footsteps of our Lord and his apostles. It is another aspect of loving our enemies and blessing those that curse us and doing good to those who hate us.
Wandering Views 
Republicans are making it way too easy for writers like Dana Milbank to skewer them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-redefine-morality-as-whatever-trump-does/2018/01/26/904fe5f4-02cc-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html?utm_term=.d378253fc12e
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Bret Stephens on Memos, Secret Societies and sad little toadies like Devin Nunes.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/devin-nunes-republicans-memo.html
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Establishment morality has always been about consumption, money and power. That’s why they lost their base.
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Sorry about that. Here is the piece by Stephens:
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Yeah Ricky, about those writers……
You need better sources, maybe less Democrat propagandists, and more straight news reporters.
Something about your NY Times link yesterday about the Mueller “firing” was bothering me. And then I remembered what it was and why, Maggie Haberman, the Dems favorite narrative changer.
https://www.weaselzippers.us/372582-reporter-behind-trump-wanted-to-fire-mueller-story-teed-up-stories-for-dems-before-according-to-podesta/
————————
Squirrel!
http://freebeacon.com/politics/harrington-report-trump-considered-firing-mueller-distract-fbi-officials-text-messages/
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Looks like Maggie’s up to her old tricks again.
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Debra, It is the Trumpian base that is dragging the rest of the party into amorality. Check the poll referenced in the article. The young and the college educated are the remaining beacons of light.
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Here is the poll:
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2516
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“The young and the college educated are the remaining beacons of light.”
I blame the education/indoctrination system, and poor parenting. The kids are just parroting what they hear.
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🤩
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Young people rarely parrot. Most will immediately reach for their phones to verify and double check. In that way they are far more difficult to mislead than those who watch cable news and read like minded blogs/papers ie an echo chamber.
But what young people are quick to jump on is hypocrisy. When evangelical leaders are quick to give Trump a mulligan, this is duly noted by the young.
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The young and educated are going to give us some version of Bernie Sanders if Trump is unsuccessful in stabilizing opportunities for working people and others who have fallen through the cracks created by globalism. These problems are largely ignored by establishment Republicans and Democrats alike. Meanwhile Republicans seem content to manufacture morality claims to prop up irresponsible policies and a grotesque lack of business ethics.
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David French agrees with you, at least about Falwell Jr.
http://amp.nationalreview.com/corner/455786/jerry-falwell-jr-beclowns-himself-again?__twitter_impression=true
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Michelle, It was interesting to compare French’s Christian response to Falwell with Goldberg’s response. I was pleased that Goldberg seemed to appreciate what French had to say.
HRW, Texas young people seem to have a lot in common with Canadian young people.
Debra, I have talked to a number of young people who are thinking outside the box about healthcare. Some like Sanders’ ideas. Others are libertarian in their approach. All agree that something has to change.
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Milton and Rose Friedman on Free Trade:
http://doc.cat-v.org/economics/milton_friedman/the_case_for_free_trade
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The virtue of young people remains to be seen. Responses to some poll or other are convincing of nothing, and there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical they (young people) have it any more together than every other pathetic generation wandering the globe today or whenever.
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GenX are a different breed from millenials (in general). They’ve observed the mishmash of education not leading to a job that the millenials have gone through and are a little more careful about the use of their time and what college is good for.
At least that’s what I’ve heard.
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Regarding the article @ 4:02, What Friedman argues for is unfettered free trade, but he does not attempt to make a moral argument for free trade; apparently he cannot. And the economic arguments he uses are weak.
When he comes up against strong, legitimate, and long-standing arguments against unfettered free trade, he either blows them off entirely (“This argument has no validity whatsoever, either in principle or in practice.”) or obfuscates with roundabout verbiage that ends up ignoring the problem altogether (“What do high and low wages mean?”) .
Like other articles of its kind, Friedman, promotes the supposed voice of the disembodied ‘consumer’ as the ultimate decider of what is good. If the man is not a moral pygmy, there is no sign of it in the article.
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At the low end of the scale, helping the consumer means people don’t go to bed hungry or cold. Friedman’s teachings have been put in place around the world since he and Rose wrote this article. Over a billion people have been raised out of extreme poverty. Fewer children are starving. There is your moral component.
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At the high end (in the US) tariffs and import quotas help some people and hurt others. The new tariff on washers may help Maytag shareholders and workers by raising prices, but people other than consumers are also hurt. Families forced to pay more for washers won’t have money to buy a toaster (or some other product) and won’t be able to eat out once a week. So the toaster company shareholders and workers are losers as is the waitress and the cook who lost their jobs. Friedman has proven that for every dollar you give to the Maytag shareholders and workers, you have to take more than a dollar from the toaster workers, the waitress and the cook. You are taking dollars from one group to be able to give quarters to another group. To me that is not just immoral, it is dumb.
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Unfettered trade is immoral just as other behaviors unregulated by virtue are immoral. Trade does not magically make bad behavior moral. Taking care of your country and allowing people to work for a living is hardly dumb. Providing companies with incentives to remove those jobs and open them in other countries is pretty much a definition of economic, political, and moral stupidity. And because of this, when the young and educated come into their own, some Bernie Sanders type will find the country ripe for the plucking. It’s foolish to let it get to that point…but that is where unfettered trade, and the materialistic, consumptive hedonism that it relies upon and produces finally ends.
The people who have promoted this reckless behavior in government and from the pulpits have lost their moral authority. It is ironic that they do not see that they have been the Franklin Grahams handing out mulligans for bad behavior in business for the past 40 years.
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Did you follow my argument? My tutoring skills must be quickly eroding. Tariffs and trade quotas hurt some Americans just as they help some Americans. Friedman and scores of other economists (it is basically undisputed) have proven that the total dollar value of the harm to those harmed by tariffs exceeds the total dollar value of the benefit to those helped by those same tariffs. That is what makes tariffs dumb. Talking about “taking care of your country” and “allowing people to work” is just repeating demagogic slogans and doesn’t in any way address the issue. Friedman and the other economists have shown that the lack of tariffs allows the people of a country to produce a higher value of goods and services and therefore earn more money. Educated leaders of countries promote free trade to “take care of their countries” and enrich their people.
This issue is not intuitive. It requires study. However, the vast majority of those who have studied the issue (primarily economists, but also tens of millions of their students and the overwhelming majority of world leaders) do not disagree with one another.
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Douthat wrote an interesting argument about immigration. He primarily chides the left for their treatment of White House aide Stephen Miller. He also made a good case for something like Trump’s new immigration plan. I guess that both sides will hate the article since they hated the plan.
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We probably could have figured out that something like this happened. One of Trump’s lawyers told Trump that top officials of the FBI needed to be discredited, so Trump unleashed his gang of nitwits and sycophants against public servants trying to do their jobs. It is the most shameful behavior by Republicans in my lifetime.
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Yawn….
Real public servants don’t leak classified info and lie under oath……..
Try again.
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Lol. Ricky, what you lack in tutoring skills, you make up in your ability to parrot your idols. But seriously, international economics has nothing of substance to say to internal distribution of income. And when you have half of your country experiencing economic distress while the other half gloats, it doesn’t take an economist to see where the next generation is going to take us. But that’s ok. What can’t be changed must be endured. I will leave you to the gossip you so obviously prefer over serious thought.
;–)
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Debra, You have hit on something. You are focused on how the pie is divided while I am focused on growing a bigger pie. However, there is no evidence that tariffs produce a more equitable division of the pie. They simply shrink the pie. If your goal is a reduction in consumption, protectionism works. It will make people poorer. Children are starving again in Venezuela.
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Douthat’s Twitter feed is the place to be right now. He is responding to leftist critics of his article posted above.
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Dan McLaughlin is fair and balanced. First, the good news:
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Now the bad news:
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The real scandal and obstruction of justice.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/01/grassley-pursues-americas-biggest-scandal.php
“While the Democratic Party press tries to pump life into Bob Mueller’s going-nowhere-fast Russia investigation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley continues to burrow into the real scandal: the corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI by Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yesterday he and Lindsey Graham sent letters to the Democratic National Committee, Hillary for America (HFA), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former DNC Chairman Donna Brazile, HFA Chairman John Podesta, and HFA’s Chief Strategist, Joel Benenson. These letters request documents and information about the individuals’ and organizations’ relationship to the Fusion GPS fake dossier on Donald Trump.”
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“Grassley and Graham request responses to these questions by February 8. They are, obviously, good questions, but there is no way they will be answered. The DNC and the other parties to whom they were sent will stonewall, evade, obfuscate and lie. Congressional investigations are pretty much useless, not because the investigators are incompetent–they generally aren’t–but because they have no realistic way to compel truthful responses. Serving interrogatories and document requests in litigation, which is essentially what Grassley is doing here, works because the rules of civil procedure compel parties to respond, and a judge presides over every civil lawsuit. If a party refuses to answer, provides evasive and inadequate responses, or lies, the judge can impose a variety of meaningful sanctions.
Here, we simply have a letter requesting information. The Democrats to whom it is addressed will either ignore it, respond in risibly inadequate fashion, or lie. And there probably isn’t anything the Senate Judiciary Committee can do about it. Still, it is good to see that Grassley and Graham are at least trying to get at the truth with regard to what shapes up as the biggest scandal in American political history.”
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-justice-department-withholds-majority-of-fbi-texts/article/2647289
“The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.
There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?
The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.
The Justice Department has identified about 50,000 Strzok-Page texts. But that is apart from the texts between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 that were declared missing a week ago but are now being recovered. So, the total is apparently 50,000 plus the currently unknown number of formerly missing texts.
But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn’t discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress.
How many texts have been turned over? Both Justice Department and Capitol Hill sources say the total number is in the 7,000 range, which includes all the texts handed over on two separate occasions.
How many texts will be turned over? First, it’s not possible to know how many texts from the Dec. 14, 2016 to May 17, 2017 time period will be recovered and turned over. But of the 50,000 the Justice Department already has in hand, officials say they have already turned over all they’re going to give to Congress.
That means Justice has decided to allow Congress to see just 7,000 of a total of 50,000 Strzok-Page texts – slightly less than 15 percent of the total number of texts the Justice Department has now. Why is that? Justice Department officials point to a Jan. 19 letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd to Capitol Hill investigators explaining which texts would and would not be turned over.
“The department is not providing text messages that were purely personal in nature,” Boyd wrote. “Furthermore, the department has redacted from some work-related text messages portions that were purely personal. The department’s aim in withholding purely personal text messages and redacting personal portions of work-related text messages was primarily to facilitate the committee’s access to potentially relevant text messages without having to cull through large quantities of material unrelated to either the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server or the investigation into Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”
Finally – and this could be significant or not – Boyd said that “in a few instances,” the Justice Department consulted with the office of Trump-Russia special prosecutor Robert Mueller and made some redactions “related to the structure, operation, and substance of the [Special Counsel’s Office]’s investigation because it is ongoing.” Hill investigators don’t really know what that covers. (The letter said if Congress has questions about redactions in a particular text, the department would “work with” Congress to further describe or reveal redacted information “in a closed setting.”)
The bottom line is that the Justice Department has turned over a fairly small percentage of the Strzok-Page texts. Even assuming many of the texts would be personal – the two were having an extramarital affair, after all – some Hill investigators wonder whether roughly 43,000 of the 50,000 known texts were wholly personal.”
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We say we need regulations (or tariffs or whatever) because people are greedy and sinful, and need to be reeled in. So, who makes those laws and regulations? Other people – who are also sinful and greedy. That’s why we end up with crony capitalism or corporatism rather than actual free market capitalism. And then people blame the real thing for the results of the corrupted thing.
I have libertarian friends who insist that things would be better for everyone if we had the real thing (free market capitalism without regulations, or without many, at least). They point to the guilds that craftsmen had (still have?) that were a voluntary way of regulating their trades. Today, with the internet, if a company abuses its employees or cheats its customers, people are going to find out about it and boycott that business. Theoretically, there would be enough jobs, because more people could afford to own their own businesses, that companies would have to offer good wages, benefits, and working conditions to keep good employees.
I don’t know how true all that is,and I do have some reservations about the whole theory, but I do agree with the point about how we trust people we probably can’t trust to regulate other people we think we can’t trust.
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Libertarian thinking seems as idealistic and utopian as Marxist thinking to me. It’s hard to pay your bills with theoretical jobs. But it will work out in the end for Believers. And in the meantime, those bright beacons—the young and educated—will soon be in the driver’s seat. I doubt they are going to fall for unfettered anything, but if truth be told, they didn’t give us abortion on demand, rampant materialism, and no-fault divorce, so I’m inclined to think they are entitled to make their own mistakes. Can’t be much worse than ours. ;–)
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I was thinking about the young and jobs yesterday. I know about 100 20-somethings. Some are my son’s friends. Some I coached in basketball. Many I taught in Sunday School. Some fall in all three categories. I don’t know of any who are unemployed. I don’t even know of any who have been unemployed for any length of time. The ones with good degrees (engineering, nursing, accounting, computer science, etc) had it the easiest. They went straight from college into good-paying jobs. The ones with bad degrees have had to hustle more, but they quickly found good jobs and most had worked during college. The ones with no college degree have really had to hustle, but that is what they have done – working in the oil fields or learning a trade or starting a business, often working two jobs and/or long hours until they got established.
Maybe we have a work culture here in Texas.
Maybe we need to thank Rick Perry who was our governor from 2000-2012. Maybe we just need to thank God for all the blessings he has given us, even if they are Yankees spending their 401ks or Mexicans doing most of the hard work.
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Kizzie, to answer your point in your first paragraph about mere humans making the laws and regulations, I would reply, not from a political or economic ideology, but from a theological standpoint, that government is the tool ordained of God to reign in humanity’s evil tendencies until the return of Christ. Paul made his statement in Romans 13 when Nero was in power, a man so morally bankrupt and impoverished in his ability to rule that his own governors revolted against him, the Roman Senate declared him a public enemy, and he committed suicide. Yet, Paul survived the plot of the Jews against him by appealing to Nero, and he later wrote in Philippians that some of Nero’s household had come to Christ; and it is in that kind of political climate that both Paul and Peter wrote that governments existed to protect the innocent and punish the evil (I Peter 2:13-17).
The implication would seem to be that any government is better than no government at all. Indeed, in places, such as Somalia or Libya or Afghanistan, where the government is limited to certain pockets and anarchy has descended outside those pockets, it is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, with horrific consequences for the average person. Corporations will not act to protect the public, unless it is in their own interests, which it seldom is – every year, a medical team from a nearby community here goes down to an area of Guatemala where most of the people are employed, at very low wages, by a certain soft drink manufacturer. The community lacks a clean water supply, so they drink the cheap soft drink, which rots their teeth, and raises the rate of diabetes and other conditions related to the physical effects of the excessive consumption of soft drinks. Yet, despite this and many other examples of how corporations seek profit first and ignore morality, we have in the West an interesting situation in which, although the government has legal limits of how much it can interfere in the lives of citizens, yet unlimited surveillance is in the hands of corporations who use it for their business interests.
It was Adam Smith, who doubted humanity had fallen and questioned the existence of God, who first marketed the idea that markets would regulate themselves. As with many ideologies of the Enlightenment era, it sounded good but was built on a false assumption of humanity; something which even Adam Smith seemed to acknowledge when he saw the effects of the market driven slave trade in the West Indies. Right now in Libya, there are slave auctions, because the business of buying and selling still goes on and gets on better when there is no government to interfere.
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Another reason for tariffs is national security. If steel, for example, or other precious minerals, food etc. are not available in our country during wartime, we would be in a world of hurt. Such items are not easily produced in an emergency. The infrastructure has to have been in place.
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Kathaleena, Good point. National security was the first of the three potentially valid arguments for tariffs listed by the Friedmans in the article @ 4:02 yesterday. It was the first argument my father always made. When the Friedmans wrote of a potentially less expensive method of dealing with such national security needs, I assume they were referring to a strategic reserve of certain items like the strategic petroleum reserve that we established at a time when our oil and gas production was down and we relied heavily on oil from the Middle East.
It would be very interesting to see a list of the items that Pentagon planners would now like to see in place. I assume they would not plan on converting all the car plants to plane and tank plants as was done in World War II, but who knows?
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My son holed out a pitching wedge from 90 yards for an eagle when he was 10. He was about as nonchalant as this boy.
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Unlike some of the more stalwart libertarians, I am not against government altogether, but do believe in a smaller government. I’m also in favor of a safety net for the needy. (From what I have learned, libertarians seem to fall on a spectrum, from no government to some-but-not-too-much government, including some regulations and a safety net.)
Certain verses about government have puzzled me. Roscuro brought up 1 Peter 2:13-14, which says:
“Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.”
Then there is Romans 13:3 :
“For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same.”
Yet, even when these verses were written, it was dangerous to be a Christian. Still today, it is against the law in many countries to be a Christian or to evangelize or hold a Bible study in one’s home. IOW, there was, and is, reason to fear the authority of their governments.
So I wonder if there is some other meaning, other interpretation of those verses. Have we misunderstood them?
The argument could be made that we are not supposed to fear anything anyway, so of course we shouldn’t fear a government that may persecute us. But that is not what the verses are saying.
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My first sentence there looks like I am including myself among libertarians. Although I think they have ideas worth considering, and even lean towards libertarianism somewhat, I cannot say I am an actual libertarian.
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No, Kizzie, we haven’t misunderstood that. Justin Martyr, in his appeal to Caesar and the Roman Senate (c. 150 A.D.), during the reign of Antonius Pius, when it was illegal to be a Christian, pleaded the case of the Christians based on those very words of Paul and Peter. He pointed out that Christians obeyed the laws, and paid their taxes, and pleaded that Christians be judged by their actions, not by their religion. But he noted in his appeal that if the Roman authorities didn’t listen, the Christians would suffer no loss, and the rulers would be held accountable for their actions by God. The anonymous writer of the epistle to Diognetus (c. 120 A.D.) said much the same thing, that Christians took care to do no evil, did good to everyone, yet were persecuted by all. As followers of Christ, we are to expect persecution. But, if you look at the cases of persecution that occur, very often it isn’t the government who is actively persecuting Christians – in many countries which officially recognize freedom of religion, but one religion is dominant, it is often the local community or even more commonly, one’s family who persecutes a convert to Christianity. Pastor A and his wife were missionaries to Somalia many decades ago, and they recalled one convert who had been at first ostracized by his family, and then ostensibly forgiven by them, but when he returned home, he was poisoned by them. The man was a martyr, but not by government officials. Even in places like Pakistan or Nigeria, when you read of the deaths of Christians, it is usually local mobs or rebel groups, not the government doing it – to date, no one has actually been executed under Pakistan’s blasphemy law, but Christians have been killed by mobs or assassinated. It was a similar case in the Roman Empire – there were periods of outbreaks of official persecution by the government, but often the persecution was provoked by personal and local resentment towards the Christians. Just look at the book of Acts and see how many times it was the Jews or local business men who felt they were threatened by the Christians who provoke the persecution. Honouring authorities who unjustly persecute us is merely walking in the footsteps of our Lord and his apostles. It is another aspect of loving our enemies and blessing those that curse us and doing good to those who hate us.
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Thank you, Roscuro.
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