Posted on 03/17/2016 8:41:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We can only hope this guy is correct...It’s time we quit growing China and Indonesia and India...
It is certainly an interesting side note in the present campaign, how often it is the Trump supporters that rely on balanced facts--that is more of the actual context--than some of his detractors.
Cheers!
International trade was less the 5% of the American gross national product in the years before the Depression. We produced virtually everything that we consumed. Food. Steel. Oil. Coal. Clothing. Cars. Trains. Airplanes. Household items. America was full of factories.
Our main imports were things like coffee and bananas that don’t grow here.
If Smoot-Hawley cut off all international trade that would have affected a mere 5% of the GNP. And of course Smoot-Hawley did nothing of the sort, it was only marginally different from the Fordney-McCumber tariff that had been in effect since 1922.
The real cause of the Great Depression was the collapse of the American banking system that resulted in a 30% contraction of the American money supply. And this was the result of a series of very bad decisions by the Fed, the absence of FDIC insurance, and restrictive American branch banking laws.
Smoot-Hawley and Black Friday on the stock market happened around the same time and the popular press has focused on them as the cause of the Great Depression ever since. They weren’t the cause. It was a monetary and banking phenomenon, and much worse in America than anywhere else because it was our banking system and money supply where the problem originated.
It appears that the Trump haters simply do not care about what is happening to rooted American communities. This is just an academic argument over one type of taxation--and they ignore other types of taxation in that argument--to those willing to take the lowest possible road to tear down Donald Trump.
So what is better, continuing to add gas to a huge bubble, or finding a way to let some of the dangerous overfill out of it and rebalancing the system?
I don’t wanna date anyone who’s mentoring a Banya!
Well, I don’t wanna date anyone whose mentor is a Costanza!
Don’t tell me, I’ll bet the study also predicted that women and children would be hurt most.
“They show little empathy or concern for all the local dislocations in towns & counties across America, which are completely masked by macro aggregations of data.
It appears that the Trump haters simply do not care about what is happening to rooted American communities. “
You’ve hit the crux of the issue. This is one of the big divisions between conservatives and libertarians and it’s why Russell Kirk couldn’t stand them. And it’s not just empathy, although that’s important, there are real financial and social costs that result when employment vanishes. Welfare, drug abuse, family breakdown, crime all follow in its wake.
For libertarians of the social Darwinist bent none of this is a concern. In their comic book world communities are invisible. They are like the flip side of the materialism that they share with Marxists.
The Founders were libertarians, and they certainly understood the importance of strong local communities, each with a unique culture, values & heritage. The present notion that drug abusing, self-centered types who thumb their noses at the traditional moral compass in their communities, are actually "libertarians" as opposed to being amoral degenerates, needs to be challenged.
Put another way. There is no clearer example of actual libertarian thought than the understanding that a community has the right to impose the high moral compass that its founders and members desire on their unique communities. It is the fact that communities have different approaches to social issues, which is why--in my opinion--the Founders refrained from giving the Federal Government any say on what we call the Police Powers of the States: Health, Safety & Morals.
But, again, we are in complete agreement--labels aside--on the terrible social harvest from the contemporary economic dislocations; especially when coupled with the decisions of activist Judges, which take away the Constitutional Rights of communities to preserve their traditional moral compass.
A Slimes nothing burger. Yummy.
Agreed. But don’t forget Hoover and his taxes, followed by FDR and his minimum wage disaster that halted ALL hiring after 1934.
I remember that book.
“I would, however, disagree with your calling those without empathy—or real community identification—as “libertarians.” “
I qualified them as ‘libertarians of the social Darwinist bent’ for what that’s worth. I was thinking primarily of those who are hostile to the conservatism of Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk, the sort who make an idol of the market. Limbaugh has a bit too much of that, although I’m certain he’s never read Nisbet and probably little of Kirk.
Well those sure didn’t help, the same as Smoot-Hawley, but they are like flesh wounds whereas the banking collapse was the patient having his leg chopped off.
Without 30% of the money supply vanishing the Great Depression would have been just another bad recession, made worse by Hoover and FDR’s meddling much like Nixon and Carter with their wage and price controls.
Schumpeter is the first I know who spotted the role of the banking system and branch banking laws in particular. He wrote about this in the 30s IIRC. I can’t remember where I read it, I used to pick up every book of his I could find. It may have been his book on business cycles but I’m not certain.
Global growth is that the transfer of everything to Soros and friends?
I haven’t picked it up but I may. I used to follow Prestowitz’s writing back in the Reagan years and read his Trading Places. Read that and Manufacturing Matters and few similar books that convinced me that our trade policy was foolish beyond belief.
Our competitors use keiretsus and chaebols and were targeting high value added industries to provide valuable employment for their people. We had idiots who literally said it didn’t make any difference whether we made potato chips or computer chips (GHW Bush trade rep IIRC). The ancillary benefits of high value added industries are understood by our rivals. Our side doesn’t even know the idea exists.
While those emotionally on our side will still seek reality--however less effectively than those who appreciate the fuller context;--it is the handicap in perception, I think, which makes it easy for the Leftist to embrace the philosophic fantasy that drives all egalitarian collectivist movements.
The sort of transfer you refer to, of course, is masked in the world of macro economics. This point—and it is a slight exaggeration, but still valid—is lost on many who treat “free trade,” as something never to be questioned, even when it is not working out because of an impediment such as Soros, a man without a moral compass.
“Regardless of their emotional identification, they are seriously handicapped by a form of myopia.”
Asperger’s Syndrome is what they make me think of.
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