Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond.
Join today for less than the price of a cup of coffee!
Trump’s Flawed Protectionism
In the midst of the din over Charlottesville, let’s not overlook the Trump administration’s controversial stance on free trade. This smoldering problem has risen to the surface in the delicate negotiations that the United States now is undertaking with China over the status of American intellectual property rights, and with Mexico and Canada over the North American Free Trade Agreement. Before looking at the particulars of these two disputes, it is instructive to set out the intellectual case for free trade, which Trump has consistently misunderstood.
The basic insight here is that ordinary contracts between private parties are not neutral; they produce gains for each party. If I swap my horse for your cow, it is tempting, but wrong, to say that no value has been added for the parties because we have the same horse and cow after the transaction that we had before it. So why worry, the argument goes, if the trade does not take place? This facile argument ignores that these transactions are costly to complete. Why would two parties waste money to organize a trade from which neither side has gained? Even this simple trade is a positive-sum game that produces for each side a net advantage that exceeds the costs of putting the deal together. I could desperately need a cow for milk or breeding, and you might need the horse to pull a plow. The trade allows both of us to get greater value by the more efficient deployment of existing resources. That short-term advantage has long-term effects, by letting me breed horses while you breed cows.
More
I’m a bit of a nerd. Consequently, I tend to draw analogies along those lines. I tend to gravitate toward history and movies, though in the word-nerd category I’ve got some clout. I enjoy deliciously crafted run-on sentences that break all the rules. Shelby Foote once wrote a sentence in The Civil War that took up an entire page. I still kick myself for not marking it out of apprehension for scarring a beautiful hardcover — even with a pencil — but secretly look forward to re-reading all 2,968 pages of its three volumes in order to find it. Books are a passion, but I get downright sick about Star Wars.
Dollar Shave Club
“We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.” That line sums up the Trump Doctrine outlined in the President’s Monday night address on Afghanistan.
Zip Recruiter
SimpliSafe
The actual number of White Supremacists in America is miniscule. They are a fringe of a fringe of a fringe. But the Democrat Media Complex is intent upon hyping up their numbers.
I think the concept of collusion is operative here, though not the sort of collusion we’ve been hearing about. No, to listen to the fanatical class, what we are witnessing is collusion by accident of birth.
Punk riots. Skinheads. Before special snowflakes, SJWs, or the alt-right’s revolt against “the tyranny of nice” became a thing, musical subcultures I can’t even pretend to understand fractured along white-nationalist and anti-white-nationalist lines.
A few weeks ago, President Trump again threw the country into a tizzy by declaring a ban on transgender people in the military. Everyone was surprised, including James Mattis, Secretary of Defense. A number of factors seemed to contribute to Trump’s decision, including contradictory ones. I’d like to explore some of those here, and also explain the reasons why his decision may actually benefit not only the military, but this nation.
