Saturday, December 17, 2016

Lord Keynes — Trump on the Free Market

When was the last time a Republican president was so hostile to free trade and dismissed the usual “free market” apologetics as the “dumb market”?
It would be so much better if he had said something like this:
“I love free trade in principle, OK? But, in practice, we just don’t have it, OK? We just don’t have it. Everybody cheats. China cheats. Japan cheats. The Europeans cheat. So therefore we need to be smart, and have fair trade, and protect American jobs and manufacturing. And, if we need tariffs, then that’s smart trade.”
Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
Trump on the Free Market
Lord Keynes

7 comments:

Six said...

"Free" trade, "free" markets, "free"dom ... its all just a libertarian fantasy. My favorite are the morons who mindlessly proclaim "freedom isn't free", and have no idea they are really saying "freedom doesn't exist".

Penguin pop said...

"The free market has never been tried" people are quite funny too. All very clueless people who have unfortunately had an influence on our politicians and their way of thinking.

Noah Way said...

Said right after he made a deal with Carrier that reeks of crony capitalism, and corporate welfare.

Bob Roddis said...

The free market has never been tried.

And you profoundly incurious anti-intellectuals cannot demonstrate that is has. In fact, you won’t even try.

http://bobroddis.blogspot.com/2012/08/daniel-kuehn-provides-factual-basis-for.html

Matt Franko said...

Bob,

any chance you are considering a jump over to the alt-right like many former libertarians are doing?

Bob Roddis said...

any chance you are considering a jump over to the alt-right like many former libertarians are doing?

1. Please provide a detailed list of these “many former libertarians”. I have my doubts about their former libertarianism. The few that I have noticed appear to have no working understanding of the unlimited lifestyle options of covenant communities.

2. Please define “jump over to the alt-right”. It’s already “legal” under libertarianism if you want to live in a strange white-ethnic enclave (although there would be no guaranty that you wouldn’t be ostracized by the rest of society who might refuse to sell you water or electricity). What more could they want?

Ryan Harris said...

Government setting rules of the market that everyone plays by is free market ideology. Making rules that are fair is the challenge because no matter the rules cheaters will cheat. So the Trump idea appears to be that the fair system is the system that isn't fixed to one ideology but a system that always addresses cheating, when ever it arises. It is consistent with the benevolent fatherly authoritarian mindset looking out for his people which we see with many Trump policies.

The concern has to be unpredictability making it difficult to do business and invest or that the rules can also be used partially, like Obama did, to quietly punish opposition and non-contributors and reward loyalty and $upporters. Once Obama turned the federal government into a corrupt Chicago/New England style machine-political racket, you know the cat is out of the bag, and we can never go back. Every decision made by every bureaucracy now must be assumed by all sides to be political payola. It's always been this way, Obama just made it overt and stopped having any pretense about it. From my perspective, as a lefty, the problem remains we have an outgoing center right politician and an incoming far-right candidate who will undoubtedly create unfair conditions to favor their own.