UPDATED: TRUMP AND TRADE

Donald Trump,Free Markets,libertarianism,Regulation,Trade

            

“TRUMP AND TRADE” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Mitt gives Mormons (whom I love) a bad name. I thought Mormons weren’t meant to bad-mouth others. Yet Mitt had nothing but bad things to say about Donald Trump, who is political tabula rasa and has never passed a law in his life.

Neither has Trump ever caused the death of a single Iraqi kid. But the religiously devout Romney called him evil for defiling the precious memory of someone who had caused many thousands of such deaths: Bush II.

The meme about Mitt Romney is that had he attacked Barack Obama with the vim and vigor he reserved for Trump, he might have made it to president.

(Likewise, if only Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League went after Muslims who lob bombs at Jews with the passion he reserves for gentiles who raise their right hand in a pledge of support for Trump. Poor Abe is seeing Nazi faces in the clouds again.)

Romney also claimed Trump would “propose 35 percent tariff-like penalties” and “would instigate a trade war that would raise prices for consumers, kill export jobs, and lead entrepreneurs and businesses to flee America.”

I don’t know that Trump favors protective tariffs, import quotas or export subsidies.

I do know that we don’t have free trade.

What goes for “free trade,” rather, is trade managed by powerful bureaucracies – national and international – central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds do as they please.

My understanding is that Trump simply wants to make these agreements and organs work for the American people.

I know, too, who did support “labeling China a currency manipulator,” so that he could “put in place, if necessary, tariffs where … they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers.”

Mitt Romney in 2012.

When it comes to the glories of an aggregate, negative balance of trade, libertarian post-graduate cleverness deserves to be questioned. …

… READ the rest. “TRUMP AND TRADE” is the current column, now on WND.

UPDATED (3/15):