Tag Archives: trump

Why Democrats Weren’t Punished in the Midterms for Covid Tyranny

The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.

Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.

This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.

There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.

Where resistance won

Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.

During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.

The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.

Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.

By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Forget recession, what is the definition of “dystopia?”

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NBC, ABC, and CBS today all feature stories about the FBI returning Donald Trump’s passports, seized in its August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago. This just four days after the Washington Post reported that federal agents were looking for “nuclear documents” among the boxes of materials taken from the White House during the raid.

Wait. Both those statements can’t be true, can they? Is it really plausible the Justice Department genuinely believes or ever believed there are nuclear secrets among the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago but was willing to return Trump’s passports just a few days later?

It has now been eight days since the raid. Were there “nuclear documents” among the materials seized or not? Certainly, the Justice Department knows the answer to that question. Why has no reporter asked?

If there were a genuine national security threat to the United States among those papers, the government would have known it within hours of taking possession of them. It would have assigned as many agents as necessary to review the documents and confirm or deny the threat immediately. Had a genuine threat of that magnitude been confirmed, a flurry of other national security activity would have been reported in the days since the raid.

It isn’t just that the government and its media apparatus got it wrong or provided information that turned out to be inaccurate later. They lied. They said things they knew at the time they said them weren’t true and continue to do so.

On Friday, Newsweek reported that the former president was “digging his legal hole “deeper and deeper” by calling the reporting on nuclear documents “a hoax,” according to legal expert Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor,

Kirschner was lying, too. First, being a former prosecutor, Kirschner is well aware that statements Trump makes to the media when not under oath cannot damage him legally. More important, Kirschner knew that if there were anything of consequence among the seized documents, Trump wouldn’t be at liberty to post his statement on Truth Social.

He wouldn’t be at liberty at all.

The “digging his legal hole deeper and deeper” statement smacks of the avalanche of headlines 2017-19 indicating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was “closing in” on Trump for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Week after week, month after month, “anonymous sources” confirmed the latest strand in the rope that would hang Trump had been woven into place.

Mueller was never “closing in on Trump.” The media that reported he was knew it. The “anonymous sources” claiming to leak inside information of the investigation knew it. And deep down, a large portion of the public who wanted to believe Trump was a Russian agent, knew it, too.

Yet, they all kept saying it in unison.

Like “recession,” there may not be one, official definition of “dystopia.” But a society in which every public institution, along with a good percentage of the population, not only regularly repeats assertions they know to be false but persecutes anyone who dissents is at least in the ballpark. When the lies form the bases for coercive government policies, then, like two quarters of negative GDP indicating a recession, you have a “good rule of thumb.”

It certainly doesn’t matter what “dystopia experts” say.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Right Will Never Stop Believing Its Myths About Law Enforcement and the Military

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An article on Revolver today laments the sad state of the U.S. military. Calling its soldiers “too fat” and its generals, “woke, parasitic, and incompetent,” the news outlet longs for the bygone days when Americans had, “the military they once did, and the one they deserve.”

This on the heels of the unprecedented FBI raid on former President Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Conservatives have had a five-year-long reality check on the true nature of that organization, which conspired with the intelligence community to manufacture the Russian collusion narrative that dominated much of Trump’s presidency.

Even then, conservatives couldn’t face the reality that the FBI has always been a political organization, placing top priority on its own survival and expansion of power, as longtime observer of the federal bureaucracy, Dr. Frank Sorrentino, said on a recent episode of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.

Likewise, they can’t see the military for what it is and has always been: just another government bureaucracy primarily concerned with its own survival, expansion, and ever-increasing funding. Instead, conservatives cling to myths about the military’s glorious past and the need for a great leader to come in and restore its previous virtues.

This unwillingness to acknowledge reality no matter how hard it punches them in the nose is tied to the most basic pillars of conservative thought. Unlike the libertarians who founded the United States, conservatives do not believe governments are instituted among men to secure natural, inalienable rights. That would require a view of human nature wherein man was capable of good and evil; government being the institution to restrain the evil side.

Conservatives don’t share that view. They believe man by nature is completely depraved, his savage instincts tenuously held in check by government power and longstanding societal customs. They truly believe law enforcement is out on the front lines of a war every single day, risking their lives to keep civilization from devolving into chaos.

This dovetails with the conservative view of Christianity, which sees man as fallen and only redeemable by the grace of God. Forget Jesus’ own words that, while sinners, we are also “the light of the world” and the salt of the earth.” Conservatives only hear the sinner part. Many seem to regard the Apocalypse as the most important book in the New Testament, its warlike imagery about the “end times” suiting their worldview much better than Jesus’ admonishment to Peter to “put your sword back in its sheath.”

And so, the unmasking of one federal institution after another, starting with the so-called “intelligence community,” proceeding to federal law enforcement, and now even the military, represents an existential crisis for conservatives. They should finally acknowledge these institutions were never what they thought they were. But they can’t. To do so would undermine their entire view of the world.

Instead, they yearn for the days when the “rank and file” FBI agents rooted out dangerous threats that might otherwise have destroyed the republic and the military heroically won “the good war” and saved the world from tyranny. They decry the sad comparison between political hacks like Christopher Wray and James Comey vs. hardnosed, incorruptible Elliott Ness (actually a Treasury agent) or between the fat, woke, and dimwitted Mark Milley vs. the steely-eyed General Patton.

While liberalism, based on a mad quest for absolute equality, provides no path to freedom, neither does conservativism, which is at its root based upon a suspicion of liberty itself. If we’re interested in a free society, conservatism’s myths must be busted once and for all.

The myth of the noble, apolitical FBI is an easy one. Right from the beginning, the agency was a political organism through and through. It’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, infamously kept files on everyone from Congressmen to presidents to ensure his position and power could never be questioned. Neither was he particularly interested in pursuing organized crime during most of his tenure, preferring to target a series of “Public Enemy Number One” solitary criminals.

Apologists for the agency who acknowledge its corruption during the Hoover years point to a “golden age” after his tenure where the FBI supposedly became the apolitical force for good conservatives imagined it to be. But this is just more hokum.

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Which Presidents Increased Spending the Fastest?

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“Can you believe this spending with a REPUBLICAN in the White House????”

I’ve heard it my entire adult life, starting during the Reagan years. I’m not sure how many times Republicans have to increase spending twice as fast as their Democratic predecessors before people get used to the idea that this is what Republican presidents do, regardless of which party controls Congress.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The Republican Party was born out of the ashes of the Whigs, whose stated goal was to expand the range of things the federal government spent money on. Before the Civil War, most roads were privately owned. Not just privately built; privately owned. Taxpayers didn’t contribute a cent towards them.

Not only did the Republican Party Sovietize the road system, they did the same with railroads and all sorts of other areas of life. Before FDR, it was Republicans who established most new federal departments.

Today, the government has Sovietized the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and other treatments, a precedent established under the last Republican president.

When you consider the actual records of Republican presidents from Lincoln through Trump, it turns out that Harding and Coolidge were the real “RINOs.”

In the post-WWII era, spending almost always goes up (not counting the obvious decrease right after the war – which led to an economic boom, btw). But I decided to take a look at how fast it went up during the various presidential administrations starting with JFK/LBJ. I used the following methodology:

Measure the increase in yearly federal spending for each president as a percentage of the spending in the last year of his predecessor. For example, spending was $590 billion in the last year of the Carter Administration. It was $1.06 trillion in the last year of the Reagan administration, an increase of $473.4 billion or 80.1%. That comes in at just over 10% per year on average.

You’ll never guess who grew spending at the slowest rate since 1951. Certainly not the Gipper. Nor was it either Bush. No, as a percentage of spending during his predecessor’s last year in office, the president who grew the budget at the slowest rate was Barack Obama.

I broke it all down on Episode 85 of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. I provide documentation of the outlays and receipts on the show notes page. A summary table is provide below.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/

A few notes:

All spending increases are aggregated for the full term of the presidency and then averaged. Example: to calculate President Obama’s spending increases, 2008 spending is subtracted from the spending during the last year of his presidency (2016) to arrive at an increase of $870 billion over eight years. That total is divided by 2008 spending of $2.9 trillion to arrive at the 29.2% aggregate spending increase. Spending increases for each presidency is calculated in similar fashion.

I combined the presidencies of Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon/Ford as Kennedy and Nixon both served partial terms which were completed by members of their own parties.

Calculations are made for the Trump years 2017-2020 and 2017-2019.

Spending is not adjusted for inflation. All spending is in billions

Of course, regardless of how quickly or slowly it increases, federal spending is always destructive. It’s important to remember the government has failed at every major spending initiative it has undertaken in my lifetime, whether it is military or domestic policy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Department of Education, the War on Drugs, Covid – it’s always all pain and no gain when it comes to the government. And the price just keeps going up.

Still, it is remarkable that spending goes up so much faster when a Republican is in the White House. The excuse is often made for Reagan that he had a Democratic Congress. But the Republicans controlled the Senate for 6 of Reagan’s 8 years in office, so that claim isn’t even true. The Democrats did have both houses of Congress during George H.W. Bush’s 4 years, but spending didn’t go up as fast during those years. Oops.

The other excuse often brought up in defense of profligate Republican presidents is that Congress “has the purse strings.” This is technically true, but when one looks at the spending proposed by the presidents in question and compares it to what Congress eventually appropriated, there is never much difference.

When an opposition party controls Congress, there is always some demagoguing over financially inconsequential components of the president’s proposal. See “funding Big Bird.” But in general, the executive branch proposes the spending and Congress rubber stamps it. And let’s not forget, no spending can occur without the president’s signature.

There is also some evidence that the combination of a Democratic president and Republican Congress may slow spending increases the most, but comparing spending increases during the first two years Presidents Clinton and Obama were in office (with Democratic Congresses) to spending increases over the remainder of their terms hardly provides conclusive proof.

The record does show that spending seems to grow relatively slowly with a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And since gridlock in Washington is always good, to the extent we get it, for all sorts of non-fiscal reasons, let’s hope for a Republican landslide in this year’s midterms.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Defend Twitter’s, Google’s, and Facebook’s property rights now or don’t complain when you’re called a racist

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Twitter took the unprecedented step on Friday of banning the president of the United States from its platform. Their justification lay in the dubious assertion Trump incited the vastly overblown incident inside the Capitol on January 6, as lawmakers attempted to count the electoral votes for president sent by the states.

Never mind that banning Trump can only incite more violence. There is the larger question of whether this constitutes an assault on free speech and what should be done about it. For libertarians, if not conservatives (no, they’re not remotely the same thing), the answer should be clear as far as government action goes: nothing.

The left’s timeworn tactic of calling anyone who opposes outright socialism a racist has worn so thin as to become cartoonish. There is a significant segment of the population who are sick of it. That was one of the major reasons Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump got 12 million more votes in 2020 than he did then.

Until Covid-19 and the monstrous, unscientific government response to it, it seemed the left had learned little from their previous defeat. No longer content to simply call non-socialists “racists,” they now upped the ante to “white supremacist” or “white nationalist.” Why? Let’s forget the meaning of the actual terms. For most Americans, “white supremacist” merely means “somebody who’s way worse than even a racist.”

I don’t believe Donald Trump is a racist and he has certainly never advanced a single policy that can accurately be described as “white supremacist.” Neither do I believe any significant portion of the 74 million people who voted for him did so because they are racists or white supremacists. But just as hundreds of his supporters may have been baited by FBI infiltrators, Antifa activists, or both into committing a self-destructive act on Wednesday, Trump’s and his supporters’ call for government action against Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is going to blow up in their faces.

Let’s not forget the libertarian and conservative position on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a nutshell, both groups generally agree with the Act’s prohibitions on any government-enforced racism. But purists in both camps disagree with its prohibitions on private businesses, specifically in Titles II and VII. I was clear in my own piece on the subject that these sections of the law should be repealed. Why? Because people have a right to make whatever rules they want on their own property, no matter how vile we may find them.

I stand by that position to this day, regardless of my personal feelings on the Jim Crow south (and north, in some cases). Yes, I fully understand Jim Crow was state and local governments prohibiting integration in restaurants and hotels and that those laws were only necessary because some people would presumably integrate their businesses without them. But let’s not pretend Jim Crow laws had no support among the people. They had overwhelming support. And they were really, really bad.

Quincy Jones recounted how black musicians had to sleep in a mortuary, with several dead bodies, while on tour in the South, because “separate but equal” failed to provide any hotels. People would travel hundreds of miles looking for a “separate but equal” place to eat lunch or even use a restroom. Next to what these people went through, suspension of our supposedly God-given right to bloviate on Twitter rather pales in comparison.

If we’re going to defend the property rights of segregationists, and I do, then we’re going to have to answer for why we don’t defend the property rights of woke tech giants. I defend them for precisely the same reason I defend the property rights of the 1960s lunch counter owner from refusing to serve black people. It’s his lunch counter. If you believe in limited government, it’s the government’s job to enforce his property rights, not other people’s preferences.

As long as I’ve been a libertarian, the answer to the question, “What would stop people from doing reprehensible things without government?” has been, “private enforcement of property rights.” Ostracism has frequently been cited as a tool individuals could use to fight against distasteful behavior and speech without government.

Well, here we are. Tech giants and the woke crowd have been doing precisely what we libertarians have always said was the non-government way to avoid associating with people we don’t want to associate with. And what is our reaction? “Regulate them!”

How could anyone credibly argue there isn’t hypocrisy here? What defense would any libertarian or conservative who objects to Titles II and VII on principle offer to those who charge them with racism, when they abandon those principles now?

Yes, it’s true the call for regulation by Trump and his supporters is to remove an exemption in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 to protect internet content providers from being sued for content by their users. This, argues the regulate crowd, gives them an unfair advantage over traditional media. Somehow, also goes the argument, this allows them to achieve “monopoly power” over the internet.

Are they kidding?

Yes, this is a protection afforded internet providers over traditional media, but it doesn’t give Google any particular advantage over other search engines nor Facebook or Twitter over MeWe or Parler. But the real question is, “Do libertarians and conservatives have total amnesia?” Does no one remember how the internet was celebrated just a few years ago as a way around the gatekeeper traditional media? Now, we’re supposed to defend CNN against Twitter and somehow that will help our cause?

Besides being tactically moronic, it’s unprincipled. If you’re a libertarian and won’t go full Monty anarcho-capitalist, then you should be looking to extend the protection to traditional media, not take it away from the tech platforms. That’s the free speech position, to protect speech from government-enforced mobbism in the courtrooms.

Let’s face it. We like to criticize the left for being dumb, especially on economics. But they’re not. They’re smart and they’re winning. The tech billionaires became billionaires largely because they think strategically. They’ve maneuvered the entire non-socialist movement into betraying their own most fiercely held principles and opening themselves up to the tired charge of racism and making it stick. I’m not sure even I could effectively defend against a charge of racism someone who thinks Titles II and VII should be abolished but Twitter should be regulated. On what grounds?

If we want to fight for property rights, free markets, and individual liberty, the special pleading must stop. Arguments like, “this isn’t really a free market” are astoundingly obtuse. Are we saying that unless and until there is 100% laissez faire, all property rights are off the table? Good luck with that. You might as well vote for AOC in 2024.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

A Free Thinker’s Guide to Voteball 2020

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2020 election It’s fitting the disastrous but highly entertaining Iowa Caucuses were scheduled one day after the Super Bowl. With the football season over and hockey and basketball far from their own playoff seasons, a large portion of the inhabitants of this continent need something to fill the gap. What could be better than the presidential primaries to take the place of quarterback sacks, slam dunks and breakaways for an entertainment-dependent public?

That was a rhetorical question.

Not all Americans are as fanatical about sports. There is a contingent so uninterested that they playfully chide those who are by referring to all organized athletics, whether amateur or professional, merely as “sportsball.” But that group isn’t nearly as large as the one completely uninterested in politics, regardless of how interested politics is in them.

Almost half the population doesn’t bother to vote in presidential elections. More than half skip Congressional, state and local elections. This august coalition needs its own dismissive, snooty-hip term for all things political. I humbly offer “Voteball.” As the great Nigel Tufnel would say, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it.”

Interested or not, Voteball 2020 is upon us and it won’t go away until November 4, when with any luck an 11^th season of the Walking Dead will be there to provide amusement a little more connected to reality. In the meantime, politicians, their surrogates, the media and even many of our neighbors will wage a full-frontal assault on our psyches.

Football, baseball and hockey players all wear helmets for safety. In Voteball, even the spectators need to protect themselves. In lieu of hard plastic headgear, I humbly offer the following safety tips:

First and foremost, remember Horton’s Law: Politicians can be counted on to keep all their bad promises, and abandon all their good ones. And don’t forget Mullen’s Corollary: Any minor good done by the current administration will be undone by the next. This will help prevent irrational exuberance over those occasional good promises made amidst all the bad ones.

Mark Twain once wrote, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe when the legislature is in session.” Most of the candidates running for president or Congress are already legislators. In President Trump’s case, he signs the bills legislators write, making them laws. So, as bad as the campaigns might be, don’t forget that every minute they spend campaigning is a minute they aren’t doing something worse.

English is not the primary language during Voteball season. From now until November, you’ll have to learn to translate a foreign language I call “Dronespeak.” It is important to avoid inadvertently adopting this language yourself as it can permanently warp your thinking. Here are a few examples of Dronespeak expressions to avoid:

“The Trump economy.” The economy is an incredibly complex combination of billions of individual decisions, partially overridden by thousands of government interventions. How well or poorly it might be doing at any given moment has very little to do with anything the president has done, no matter how much credit he or she tries to take. This isn’t directed at Trump. There was no Obama economy, Bush economy, or Clinton economy either. America prospers despite presidents and governments, not because of them.

“The commander in chief.” Yes, the president is commander in chief of the military and it’s perfectly appropriate to use this term when speaking of a strictly military issue. But it’s becoming more and more common to simply refer to the president this way in any context, as if he were commander in chief of the citizens. What an awful concept.

“Run the country.” Voteball doesn’t determine who will “run the country.” This is closely related to the “commander in chief” meme. The president doesn’t run the country. He or she runs the government, which causes enough problems on its own. Let’s not encourage any ambitions beyond that.

“My president.” “The president” is best; “our president” is questionable. “My president” is terrifying. It sounds a lot like those who say they have a personal relationship with God. Theological debate on that concept is fine, but can we agree applying it to a politician is blasphemy in a supposedly free country?

“We.” If Voteball in general is a war on your soul, presumptive use of the first-person plural pronoun is the enemy machine gun fire. It will be flying at you nonstop from every direction and it only takes one hit to take you out. Anytime anyone begins a sentence with, “We need,” “We must,” “We believe,” or “We all agree,” the proper response is, “Who is we?” Or, you could just refer them to Wemus.

This is by no means exhaustive but hopefully this short guide will not only help keep you safe from the dangers identified above but will give you the tools to identify and mitigate many others. Taking just a few precautions can make all the difference in enjoying a safe and entertaining Voteball season.

Like those 1950s monster movies, the DC empire trots out the same tired old script to justify war with Iran

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soleimani funeral

For those of you too young to remember, the Iraq War – now considered at the very least a mistake by just about everyone – was justified at the time with propaganda including the following:

1. A preposterous claim Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11

2. Claims Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction” and was planning “imminent attacks” on the US that could occur “within 45 minutes” (BTW, the definition of “imminent” has been greatly expanded since then)

3. Claims the Iraqi people would thank us for the invasion, later supported by laughable tight shots of a few dozen people (in a city of about 8 million) supposedly celebrating the arrival of US troops in Baghdad.

Like all those 1950s movies about nuclear missile testing creating giant monsters to destroy American cities (a giant octopus, giant ants, a giant lizard, etc), the DC empire simply dusts off the same, tired old script, changing only the names and places. And Americans flock to the ticket booth; then chant USA! USA! all the way to their seats.

This time around, we have Pence claiming Soleimani was involved in 9/11, Pompeo saying the Iraqi and Iranian governments will be upset but the people will thank us (take a look at some pictures of Soleimani’s funeral), and the persistent, decades-old claim Iran is just months away from developing a nuclear weapon.

The United States has not had a war on its soil since 1865. While that is a good thing in and of itself, it seems to have produced generations of Americans who require virtually no justification to support yet another war on somebody else’s soil.

Donald Trump was supposedly elected to end “endless wars.” His destruction of Jeb Bush in a South Carolina debate and subsequent win in its primary was one of the most extraordinary moments of his candidacy. So, why aren’t his supporters holding his feet to the fire as he morphs into George W. Bush? Could it be he was elected in spite of, rather than because of, his sincere-at-the-time promise of a less interventionist foreign policy? Perhaps Trump’s voters elected him purely based on his mercantilist economic and hardline immigration rhetoric, with foreign policy being a non-issue for most. It’s hard to find evidence to the contrary.

And why the seeming abandonment of that “America First” foreign policy (which was itself riddled with wiggle room) by The Donald himself? Is it possible that the Lindsey Grahams of the Republican Party, while no longer in the majority (or are they?), nevertheless represent enough votes in the Senate to join with Democrats in removing him from office and are using that leverage to bend Trump to their will?

That certainly seems more plausible than the monster movie script.

Trump Winning the Trade War Would Make China Stronger, Not Weaker

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trump china We don’t win anymore,” said candidate Donald Trump numerous times during his 2016 presidential campaign, referring to America’s trade relationship with other countries. Trump and tens of millions of his supporters hold the protectionist view that trade, like all human relationships, is a war that must be “won.” Rather than exchanges that leave both parties better off, protectionists see trade as a zero-sum game in which one side benefits at the other’s expense.

Fair Trade Over Free Trade

The president has said on more than one occasion that he supports free trade, but he insists it must be fair, meaning that China or other partners reciprocate any relief from tariffs and other burdens placed on their exports. And it is true that China has not treated American exports to China the way America has treated Chinese exports to America.

China has been more protectionist and is likely engaging in some subsidization and/or other government assistance to its exporters, even if it and its effect on America’s trade deficit with China are greatly exaggerated. Americans would be better off with zero tariffs and completely free trade regarding its imports.

Regardless, Trump and his supporters draw completely the wrong conclusion. Persuading Xi Jinping to adopt free trade policies would make China’s economy stronger, not weaker.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Cut Wasteful Spending on the Obsolete Conventional Military

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A15332A0-C600-4068-9614-088791DE7B75 What possible reason could there be to increase spending on the mostly obsolete conventional military?

The days of wars ending with one country marching into the capital of another are over, other than when DC invades some destitute, virtually defenseless Third World backwater.

No nuclear power is going to surrender without firing its nukes. No conventional navy is going to survive the first week of a war against a country with a modern missile system.

Generals in the Pentagon live in a dreamworld where they’re all Patton marching into Palermo. Let them fantasize on their own dime.

All of this military spending is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. The 21st-century US military is just a wealth transfer program for a few rich elites and a jobs program for about a million people who would otherwise have to do something productive.

It keeps the latter in a childlike state where they don’t have to face the uncertainty of the real world, where you can be let go even if you’re doing a good job.

It also has the secondary effect of making single payer health care programs in other countries look more viable than they really are, as those countries can stay marginally solvent by not wasting a trillion dollars a year on military spending.

The federal government has to be cut drastically in size and scope, starting with the most economically-damaging spending, military spending, or we’re in for a shocking dose of reality in terms of lower standards of living.

21 Months Later, Nothing in DC Has Changed Under Trump

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Publication1 Despite 21 straight months of screaming headlines from both anti-Trump and pro-Trump media, virtually nothing about Washington, DC and it’s empire has changed.

There are still US troops and their suppliers voraciously consuming taxes all over the world. Not a single regulatory agency has been eliminated or significantly cut. Entitlements continue their headlong sprint towards fiscal oblivion. And federal spending continues to outpace inflation, faster under Republicans, as usual.

And honestly, neither Republicans nor Democrats voted against any of that.

Trump was able to win the 2016 election not because he was going to radically change Washington, DC, but because he was going to superficially change its marketing from “progressive” to “conservative.” To be fair, he never promised to cut anything. On the contrary, he promised not to touch Social Security or Medicare and to increase spending on the military. He’s kept both promises.

He did promise to eliminate two regulations for every new one, but that is a very vague promise. Suppose there was one regulation that said all construction workers had to wear hard hats and another regulation that said they all had to wear safety googles. Repealing both regulations and replacing them with one that says, “All construction workers must wear hard hats and safety goggles” is perfectly consistent with Trump’s promise. Is that what his regulators are doing? It’s hard to tell. It appears the federal register is smaller, but is the economy fundamentally less regulated? What happened to getting rid of whole federal departments, as Republicans promised to do just six years ago?

The truth is the so-called Swamp continues because most Americans don’t really want to drain it, despite overwhelming evidence that everything it does creates large-scale human misery. Just ask any ten neighbors if they’d support cutting Social Security or Medicare, much less eliminating either, or cutting the military by even 30% (which would still leave it by far the largest in the world). Ask them if they’d support getting rid of the Departments of Education, Agriculture, or even the completely useless Department of Commerce.

When push comes to shove, they won’t even support getting rid of the TSA, which is Oh-fer in seventeen years on preventing actual terrorist attacks and still has a well over 90% fail rate in detecting dangerous items on its own tests. That’s not to mention the nightmarish surveillance state, five years after Edward Snowden exposed it. Americans are only upset about it when it spies on politicians – a completely backwards position in a supposedly free country.

The mid-term elections are approaching and the usual “this is the last chance to save the republic” rhetoric is already reaching a fever pitch. In reality, nothing about the republic has changed or will change until a critical mass of Americans truly want less government. Right now, that’s hard to imagine considering who wins elections.