Monthly Archives: August 2015

Trump Flaunts Shape-Shifting Powers

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Government, Liberty, Tyranny

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trump characature

Donald Trump could take just about any position on any issue and defend it with conviction and blustery passion… until he changes his mind. At this point in his presidential bid, there is nothing on his campaign web site in the way of specific policy statements. Here is an “On The Issues” post showing the evolution of Trump’s positions in a number of policy areas. Just about anyone on the left or the right should be able to get a few chuckles out of this list. It’s truly astonishing.

A few of Trump’s current policy positions are discussed below, but before getting into that, it’s interesting to consider the overall tenor of his rhetoric. Most observers will happily admit that they find his bombast entertaining, and I do too. He’s outspoken and unapologetic, confronting his critics head-on, often to powerful effect. Many are drawn to this sort of candidate, and his popular image as a skilled businessman doesn’t hurt. But while all politicians are capable of disappointing supporters, Trump fans do not know, and cannot know, what they’re getting.

Trump is almost always critical but rarely suggests actual solutions, making it difficult to discern whether he really has policy positions. So much so that it’s incredible to hear praise for his “clarity”. For a more sober take, read Andy Kroll’s account of frustrated attempts to get direct responses on a few policy issues from the Trump campaign, and of Trump’s bizarre tour of Laredo, Texas. A related piece by Peter Suderman appears at Reason.com. Politico has emphasized the same point in “Will the real Donald Trump please stand up?“. Kroll says this:

“I have zero to report about Trump’s plans for actually being president—except that, from all available evidence, he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought.“

An interesting piece on Trump comes from Jeffrey Tucker in “What is Trumpism?“. A longer version appeared as “Trumpism: The Ideology“. Here is one bit from Tucker, written after hearing “The Donald” speak at FreedomFest:

“The speech lasted an hour, and my jaw was on the floor most of the time. I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety. …

His speech was like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground, and died grim deaths.“

Here are a few examples of Trump’s “nativism”, as described by Tucker:

“I did laugh as he denounced the existence of tech support in India that serves American companies (‘how can it be cheaper to call people there than here?’ — as if he still thinks that long-distance charges apply). 

When a Hispanic man asked a question, Trump interrupted him and asked if he had been sent by the Mexican government. He took it a step further, dividing blacks from Hispanics by inviting a black man to the microphone to tell how his own son was killed by an illegal immigrant.“

Two issues on which Trump has been outspoken are international trade and immigration. As an aside, I note that he is always quick to qualify any aggressive statements he makes on these topics with a quick “I love the Chinese”, or “I love the Mexicans”. Tucker, at the link above, highlights Trump’s backward views on trade, which focus almost exclusively on U.S. producers without considering the benefits of trade to U.S. consumers. He sees big ships coming into port, and thinks only of cash flowing abroad: “What do we get?” Well, we get nice foreign goods, thank you very much. But Trump blames foreign trading partners for many ills, despite the fact that his Trump-label ties are made in China! Are we somehow being cheated on those ties? Trump says we need smarter people negotiating “these deals”. Okay… is that a policy?

We don’t need trade wars if we want to avoid a much weaker economy. Yet Trump’s trade rhetoric suggests that he would be tempted to employ trade restrictions like tariffs as a bludgeon. For example, consider one of his other big talking points: illegal immigration (despite the fact that the inflow of illegals has slowed to a trickle over the past few years). Trump wants to build a wall across the length of the U.S.-Mexican border, and he says he’ll make Mexico pay for it. To get a wall built, Trump might well decide that he can raise tariffs on Mexican goods to prohibitive levels as a way of twisting Mexican arms. That sort of action is likely to be very costly for U.S. consumers, and ultimately producers as well.

Trump’s latest pronouncements on immigration policy have been described as confusing. In a nutshell, he wants to deport “the criminals” (and not just those already doing time) and deport all other undocumented aliens; create an expedited process whereby we can let “the good ones” back into the country with legal status; “maybe” create some sort of path to citizenship (because “who knows what’s going to happen”), but not right away; and “we’re going to do something” for the “DREAMers”. Trump says he’ll know how to identify the “good ones”. If he’s so confident of that, then why would he, a smart “business guy”, allow the country to incur the expense of deporting millions of them?

Who knows what Trump will propose in terms of tax reform, health care and gun control? Ditto on welfare policy, defense, the drug war, foreign policy and energy. He wisely spoke against the drug war in 1990, but I’m not aware of any recent statements on the issue. Also in his favor, he does not accept the “consensus” on climate change and opposes Common Core. He has criticized crony capitalism but has undoubtedly benefited from cronyism, enlisting governments in the pursuit of eminent domain action. He is said to favor cuts in federal spending, but he has opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. He opposes an increase in the minimum wage, but he has proposed a wealth tax in the past.

Trump has not offered many specifics in this campaign, and the GOP debate this Thursday night will not provide a decent forum for articulating policy. In general, his positioning is a very mixed bag. One gets the sense that he is doing his best to appeal to a sort of populist conservatism. Unfortunately, his signature “positioning” on trade and immigration qualify him as something of a statist. He has certainly held a number of other statist views in the past, though he has disavowed at least some of those.

In closing, here are two more quotes from Jeffrey Tucker about Trump that I found both ominous and plausible:

“What’s distinct about Trumpism, and the tradition of thought it represents, is that it is not leftist in its cultural and political outlook (see how he is praised for rejecting “political correctness”), and yet still totalitarian in the sense that it seeks total control of society and economy and demands no limits on state power.“

“These people are all the same. They purport to be populists, while loathing the decisions people actually make in the marketplace (such as buying Chinese goods or hiring Mexican employees).“

Hillary’s Got Some Promises and a Rat’s Nest

03 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Government, Central Planning

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Hillary

Hillary Clinton is an advocate for governmentalizing the social order, and asks America to trust that central control, under her command, will accomplish great things such as upward mobility for the middle class, a rising standard of living, green energy for all, a “fix” for Obamacare, and much else. Jeffrey Tucker writes of Hillary’s delusions in “Hillary Clinton’s Ideological Vortex of Power and Planning” and her assurances that she’ll take measures with predictable impacts on the global climate, measures that will direct all details of energy production and use.

Tucker throws cold water on Hillary’s promises by viewing them in the context of F.A. Hayek warnings about the ruinous effects of central planning and control:

“That brilliant economist spent 50 years explaining, in book after book, that the greatest danger humanity faced, now and always, was a presumption on the part of intellectuals, politicians, and bureaucrats that they know better than the emergent and evolving wisdom of social forces.

This presumption might seem like science but it is really pretense. Civilization arises from, is protected by, and advances through the dispersed knowledge of billions of individual decision makers and the institutions that arise from them.

Hayek called the issue he was investigating the knowledge problem. Society needs to know how to use scarce resources, how to navigate a world of uncertainty, how to form rules that turn struggle into peace. It is a problem solved through freedom alone. No ruler, no scientist, no intellectual can substitute for the evolving process of decentralized decision making and trial and error.“

I discussed the fatuous presumptions of the left in an earlier SCC post entitled: “Conscious Design, the Collective Mind and Social Decline“. In that post, I used the wonderful Hayek quote:

“We flatter ourselves undeservedly if we represent human civilization as entirely the product of conscious reason or as the product of human design, or when we assume that it is necessarily in our power deliberately to re-create or to maintain what we have built without knowing what we were doing.“

More specifically, on energy policy, Clinton says she will set an agenda for the country to produce enough renewable energy within 10 years to power every American home, and to install half a billion solar panels across the country by the end of her first term. As Ira Stoll says at Reason.com, this is “central planning at its worst“.

“Clinton assumes that man-made climate change is a risk serious enough to try to mitigate, and that America should try to mitigate it by reducing its carbon emissions. These are big ‘ifs,’ but ones I will grant for argument’s sake. Even granting those assumptions, there is a humongous logical leap to the conclusion that the appropriate policy response is setting a national target for the number of solar panels installed.

For one thing, it’s a classic error of measuring inputs rather than outputs. If the goal is the reduction of dangerous emissions, why not set a goal for that, and support any energy method—solar, wind, algae, hydroelectric, nuclear, hydrofracturing—that gets America closer to that goal? Why privilege solar over all the other technologies, including some that may not even be invented yet?“

Certainly, proposals like this create tremendous opportunities for rewarding cronies. Stoll also notes that solar technology will improve over time, but rushing to install millions of panels, undoubtedly encouraged by heavy subsidies, would saddle users in the long-term with less efficient versions. With future improvements in efficiency and cost, the technology will gradually draw users in without the need for subsidies. That’s what rational economic decision-making looks like!

A specific economic proposal from the Clinton camp would increase the capital gains tax rate on asset sales held from 364 days up to six years. The rate would double if the asset was held up to two years. The increases become gradually smaller for two-to-six year holding periods. Hillary’s is somehow unaware that the government has already made it incredibly difficult for businesses to raise capital to invest in new buildings, equipment, and technology. Capital gains taxes are punitive: they represent double taxation of income to investors and they further distort rates of return by taxing assets on inflationary increases in value, which diminish their real value. Larry Kudlow wrote a good opinion piece on this proposal, called “Hillary’s Inconceivably Stupid Capital-Gains Tax Scheme“. He focuses on Hillary’s attack on the alleged “short-termism” in the economy, but this is a little odd, because her plan essentially discourages saving.

On health care, Clinton has pledged to “improve” Obamacare, but not repeal it. Too bad. It is similar to the plan she put forward as a Senator, including the individual mandate. The only piece of good news here is that she has discussed eliminating the employer mandate, which has been deferred by the Obama Administration twice already. However, some effects of the employer mandate have been felt, as it has tended to discourage employers from taking on full-time employees.

On foreign policy, Clinton is probably more hawkish than President Obama. Her stint as Obama’s Secretary of State was not marked by any noteworthy accomplishment.

Then there is the question of Clinton’s integrity. She’s been tainted by scandals before (e.g., Whitewater). She told a Brian Williams-like lie about being fired upon in Bosnia. The role of the Clinton Foundation, and whether it served as a mechanism for influence-buying, has also been in question, not to mention its seeming role as a personal slush fund for the Clintons. Her ties to Wall Street probably exceed Obama’s. And she maintained a private email server while Secretary of State, which was imprudent at best, and depending on the the classification of what went through that server, criminal at worst. Finally, her involvement in the Benghazi tragedy has been in question from the beginning. On some events related to Benghazi, including Hillary’s potential involvement in suspicious arms trading activity, Andrew Napolitano insists that “Hillary Keeps Lying“.

And here is Jeffrey Tucker waxing sarcastic about Hillary in another context: “Just trust her. Truly, just trust her …”