TRUMP Trade Tactics Are About WINNING Negotiations

Canada, Free Markets, Labor, Taxation, Trade

I love Canada, am a Canadian (and American) citizen, have Canadian loved-ones. I don’t want to see Canadians hurt.

It’s true, however, that, in the artificial universe of trade agreements, previous US leaders have shown they don’t care about US workers. Trump’s the opposite. He’s using American power to muscle deals he believes are beneficial to American workers.

Canada taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, whereas America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000. Trump has said he’d love for trade to be entirely and mutually without tariffs:

“No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘no tariffs’,” the US president said, describing his meetings with fellow Group of Seven leaders as positive “on the need to have fair and reciprocal trade”. “The United States has been taken advantage of for decades and decades,” he continued, describing America as a “piggy bank that everyone keeps robbing.”

But since that’s not going to happen …

“Canada is going to have to make some concessions,” says Laura Dawson, head of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC. Among them might be raising the threshold at which Canada taxes purchases of American goods from C$20 to around C$1,000, the American level. Canada might consent to more onerous conditions for a vehicle to be imported duty-free within NAFTA, including on wages and the amount of North American content.

And of course, the American market is enormous. Trump knows it. Leaders before him no doubt knew the power of American markets but refused to use it:

Canada gamely argues that the United States would also be hurt in a trade war. Canada is the biggest destination for exports from 36 of the 50 American states. Bilateral trade in goods and services is immense: $674bn in 2017. It is also, despite what Mr Trump says, balanced. In 2017 the United States had a small surplus with Canada, of $8.4bn. Yet Mr Trudeau’s bargaining position is weak. “We absolutely need them, but they could live without us,” says Philip Cross, an economist.

BESIDES,

Canada’s system of supply management, which sets limits on the production of dairy, poultry and eggs, has long irritated the United States (and should anger Canadians, who pay more for food than they need to). Canada subjects imports of those products beyond a ceiling to punishing tariffs (298% in the case of butter). Mr Trump has been angry about this since he met dairy farmers from Wisconsin in April 2017.

The article is “Canada: Breaking a few eggs: The economy is already feeling the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war,” courtesy of The Economist.

TV Judge Napolitano’s Nonsensical Indictment Of Trump Border Policy

IMMIGRATION, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, UN

Judge Napolitano is a left-libertarian. Always said so. On this site, I have often  exposed and argued against  his lefty exploits. Here he essentially asserts that if X trespasses into your home, you can’t, in natural law, remove him. Crap. I hazard that, were you to research this bit of Napolitano legalism, you’d find he’s hiding/finessing certain aspects of due-process jurisprudence.

UPDATE (7/2): I might not have phrased my words above well. Responses on Facebook certainly indicate so. My bad. I am a huge proponent of natural law. However, I think Napolitano here is not articulating natural justice at all, but is full of it. His is more legalism than natural law. I am sure there is a state-passed law somewhere that judges like him can use to criminalize what President Trump is doing. I doubt it’s natural law. Where in natural law does it imply that trespassers have to be kept in their natural clans and formations? That nonsense would be the purview of the positive law, most certainly “international law.”

Of course, “Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”—ILANA (May 1, 2009)

Who Cares About Hope Hicks! Why Is The Excellent John Kelly Leaving The White House?!

Donald Trump, Family, Government, Media, Politics

Journalists should be asking (but they don’t) why the most excellent John Kelly is rumored to be leaving the White House. Instead, they are rabbiting about a girl with super-model looks, Miss Hope Hicks, who left the White House.

Why is it of no interest to this incurious lot (the media) that the liberal Kushners had been gunning for White House Chief of Staff Kelly for a long time? As I warned on February 15, 2018:

… if Chief of Staff John Kelly is ousted, it will be the doing of the Goldman-Sachs West-Wing matriarchy. Dina Powel, former adviser to Ivanka and previously on Trump’s National Security Council [she has a BA], is a relic from Goldman Sachs and an Ivanka recruit. The affable Democrat Gary Cohn [he left, too], Trump’s chief economic advisor, is former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs. These “Kushner-Cohn Democrats” ousted Stephen Bannon from the West Wing, and are, no doubt, gunning for John Kelly.

When Powel and Cohn departed, the work to oust Kelly was likely completed by the Kushner duo.

More Kushner exploits:

NEW COLUMN: Applauding The Donald’s Ongoing Creative Destruction

Constitution, Democrats, Donald Trump, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Republicans, The Courts, The State

“Applauding The Donald’s Ongoing Creative Destruction” is the current column, now on WND.COM.

An excerpt:

Big Media, the policy veterans and the chancelleries across Europe and Britain are constantly complaining: Donald Trump has had the temerity to defy their international order, summit—and seek peace—with their enemies, and mess with the multilateral maze they call agreements. He even declared, early in June, that the US would be far better off if it negotiated bilateral trade agreements.

Or, in Trump speak, “country-on-country agreements.”

But what does an entrenched punditocracy, a self-anointed, meritless intelligentsia (which is not very intelligent and draws its financial sustenance from the political spoils system), oleaginous politicians, slick media and big money care? They’ve all worked in tandem to advance a grand government—national and transnational—that aggrandizes its constituent elements, while diminishing those it’s supposed to serve.

These political players have built the den of iniquity Trump keeps trampling. Against these forces—NAFTA, NATO, FBI, DOJ, CIA, a whole alphabet soup of acronyms that stands for the Permanent State, national and international—is Trump, still acting as a political Samson that threatens to bring the house crashing down on its patrons.

And his latest. Trump’s judicial appointments, in particular, might just prove to be “his most enduring legacy,” lamented the liberal Economist. These certainly threaten to cement the Supreme Court’s originalist bent:

.. No president has confirmed more federal appellate judges (12) in his first year than Donald Trump. He has also seen six federal district-court judges confirmed, and one Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch. Another 47 nominees await confirmation; 102 more federal judgeships remain open for Mr. Trump to fill. With two of the Supreme Court’s liberal justices, and its one unpredictable member (Anthony Kennedy) aged 79 or older, the president [will] get to name another justice [maybe two] …

Published in June of 2016, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” made the case that Donald J. Trump is the quintessential post-constitutional candidate.

In the “Opening Statement” titled “Welcome To The Post-Constitutional Jungle,” oldies will recognize a nod to the Guns N’ Roses classic, “Welcome to the Jungle,” as well as to broadcaster Mark Levin’s coinage.

We inhabit what Levin has termed a post-constitutional America. The libertarian (and classical conservative) ideal—where the chains that tether us to an increasingly tyrannical national government are loosened and power is devolved once again to the smaller units of society—is a long way away.

Where the law of the jungle prevails, the options are limited: Do Americans get a benevolent authoritarian to undo the legacies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and those who went before? Or, does the increasingly ill-defined entity called The People continue to submit to Demopublican diktats, past and present?

The quintessential post-constitutional candidate, Trump’s candidacy was for the age when the Constitution itself is unconstitutional. Like it or not, the original Constitution is a dead letter, having suffered decades of legislative, executive and judicial usurpation.

The natural- and common law traditions, once lodestars for lawmakers, have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute. However much one shovels the muck of lawmaking aside, natural justice and the Founders’ original intent remain buried too deep to exhume.

The Constitution has become just another thing on the list of items presidential candidates check when they con constituents.

The dissembling words of many a presidential candidate notwithstanding, the toss-up in the 2016 election was, therefore, between submitting to the Democrats’ war on whites, the wealthy and Wal-Mart, or being bedeviled by mainstream Republicans’ wars on the world: Russia, China, Assad and The Ayatollahs. Or, suffering all the depredations listed and more had Candidate Clinton been victorious. …

… READ THE REST. “Applauding The Donald’s Ongoing Creative Destruction” is the current column, now on WND.COM