Monthly Archives: May 2016

Reform Week Part III

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In 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first confirmed billionaire. One hundred years later the United States alone has 540 billionaires with a net worth of roughly $7 trillion dollars. That is about 10% of the entire US net worth. There are another 1270 known billionaires in the world, most of whom have extensive dealings in the US. Carlos Slim, for example, owns the American media by owning the New York Times. He may not be able to donate to campaigns, but he can get involved in other ways.

That is, in fact, how billionaires do politics. Giving directly to a candidate is not worth a whole lot to a rich guy due to caps on contributions. Even bundling contributions by getting all of your rich buddies and employees to give to a candidate is just a drop in the bucket to a modern campaign. The real impact is in funding the Super-PAC. A rich guy can give as much as he likes, without a lot of scrutiny from the press or regulators. In this election, just 50 billionaires are responsible for 50% of super-PAC spending.

The problem this creates for the political class is two-fold. If you are an ambitious politician, a Paul Ryan for example, you need to win elections and that means not making any enemies that can cause you trouble. The enemies that can cause you trouble are those who can finance a primary challenger to you in the next election. That means toadying up to the big spenders in politics, even if it means screwing your own voters.

The flip side of this is the fact that the technological revolution has made all of this public. Worse yet, it has made it possible for a challenger to use it against you via social media and internet campaigns. Paul Nehlen is not a well funded or well known candidate, but he is going to force Ryan to run a real campaign this summer. Big shots from the insurgency are flying in to help Nehlen simply to spite Paul Ryan.

The reason is people all over the country, via the miracle of the internet, can see that Ryan is a sellout so Nehlen is getting lots of help in his campaign. None of this would be happening if Ryan were relying on local funding for his campaigns. He would be tending to that knitting instead of ball washing the Koch Brothers at swank Washington DC restaurants. Instead, the third most powerful politician in DC is in primary fight.

The irony is that the technological revolution that created the donor class has also made it easier to spot a politician that is selling his vote. Thirty years ago, a Tom Daschle could be a conservative Democrat at home in South Dakota but vote with Ted Kennedy in Washington. He could do this while his wife made a tidy living as a Washington lobbyist. It was a nice grift, even though it was small time. The money is much bigger today, but it is all out in the open.

To their credit, many politicians have understood the dilemma and sought to mitigate it. Campaign finance reform was an effort to solve the problem, but the Citizens United case turned the virtues of campaign finance reform into a vice. The politicians have lost control of their own reelection efforts as they are now run by outside groups. The modern politician does little other than give speeches to curry favor with the donor class.

It is an interesting dilemma for Congressman and Senators in that the strategy they often use on the middle class has now been turned on them. The game of “top and bottom versus the middle” has been standard politics in America for generations. Now it is being used in Washington. You either piss off the Wilks Brothers or you piss off your voters. In the modern age, it is an impossible dilemma.

Of course, another aspect to this is the brain drain. It used to be that a gifted political talent sought elected office. Today, the big money is in running super-PAC operations, fund raising operations and policy shops. That is where the talent goes, leaving feckless grifters like Ben Sasse to be the bright stars of the GOP. The massive void of political talent in both parties is due to the fact the political talent is in the shadow campaign system.

I have pointed out previously that the non-profit rackets have become an enormous problem in American politics. One remedy is to pull the plug on the tax provisions that allow donors to deduct their donations. That draws down money flowing into these things. Another way, one that would have to apply to super-PAC operations, is to have full disclosure of all donors and the amount of their contribution.

This exists to some degree with contributions to parties and candidates. Extending this out to super-PAC and think tank contributors would most likely have the same effect it had on campaign spending, which is to diversify the donor base. This would also mean disclosing all salary data. It is the opacity of these operations that makes them so effective so letting the sunlight in would level things up a bit. It is not a perfect solution, but it is something they could pass and something the courts would accept.

A lot of people reading this will be horrified because they have been conditioned by the libertarian cult to worship rich people. There is a huge difference between the guy who gets rich building a better mousetrap and the the modern financial buccaneers riding the waves of credit money in the global economy. The former has a stake in his people and society. The latter sees every port as a chance for booty.

Even so, rich people will always be with us, but the concentration of wealth is not healthy for self-government. The Founders understood this which is why they designed a system to make it hard to concentrate power and in the current age, money is power. Having 0.0002% of the population controlling 10% of the nation’s net worth is destabilizing. Having fifty guys running the national politics of three hundred million is insane.

Reform Week Part II

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A reform oriented ruling class will seek reform is the areas they understand best and the areas that offer the quickest return. Governance has always been about picking the low hanging fruit. In a democratic system, long term planning is impossible, which is not the terrible thing many claims. More than a few disasters have been the result of grandiose plans cooked up by megalomaniacs looking for a legacy. There is something to say for muddling through the problems that are presented, in order of urgency.

The most obvious place the political class can be effective is in tax policy. In present day America, tax policy no longer serves the needs of the political class and is a source of mischief that is one cause of the public unrest. The point of taxes is to fund government, but the modern welfare state is funded by credit money, created via the banking system. How long this can go on is open to debate, but if there is ever going to be a return to sound fiscal policy in the United States, the tax system will need a complete overhaul.

Even if Congress wanted to fully fund spending, the present system prevents it. The acres of loopholes, exceptions and vague contradictions make tax avoidance too easy for the people with money. Washington faces the same problem Julian faced when taking command Gaul after defeating the Alamanni in 357. Raising taxes just meant more bribery by the rich to avoid paying any tax. The answer was lowering taxes in exchange for increased compliance.

It is not just the complexity of the code that is a problem. It is the underlying philosophy of who gets taxed and how that needs to be administered. Returning to Rome, a problem in late antiquity was that wealthy landowners not only avoided taxes, but they also avoided military service. They also shielded their workers from service. There was a chronic shortage of military age men. The result was a version of the tragedy of the commons. The people benefiting from empire contributed little to maintain it.

Today, large global enterprise pays little in tax, but gain enormously from Federal policy. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, have huge tax and regulatory burdens, getting little but trouble from the Federal state. Small business, of course, always sees government as an obstacle, because they have zero influence over legislators. Compounding the problem is that business taxes are ultimately passed onto employees and customers through reduced wages and higher prices.

A reform that would solve a few problems for the political class, as well as position the economy for the modern age, is to eliminate business taxes entirely. For starters it would re-shore about a trillion in assets squirreled away in tax havens. Companies like Apple spend a lot of time hiding money around the world to avoid US taxes. It would also encourage global corporations to headquarter in the US.

Corporate income taxes are about 11% of federal tax receipts so eliminating this tax is not insignificant. Some of it would come back through increases in other taxes as business activity ticks up due to the new tax status. The rest should be raised through increases in personal taxes on the rich. There is simply no reason for special tax treatment of capital gains, for example, other than as a sop to the wealthy. Government is about protecting the assets of the rich. They should be paying the bulk of the cost.

An overhaul of the tax code like this, with flattening of personal taxes in general, would be an easy sell to the public. On the one hand, it would be an instant boost to the economy. On the other hand, it would address the growing sense that the super-rich are out of control. No one will lose any sleep over the government taxing the billionaires. The amount of money involved to off-set the elimination of corporate income taxes is not so much that a “tax the rich” campaign would set of rich flight.

Finally, the elimination of corporate taxes means the end of charitable deductions and not-for-profit tax rackets. Washington is now ringed by 501(c)(3) operations that are just lobbying and public relations organs for the rich and various business interests. Eliminating the tax provisions will not make them go away, but it will eliminate the incentives to create them. These think tanks are a shadow government hobbling Congress, the regulatory agencies and damaging the normal functioning of the mass media.

None of this will do much to address public finances or the corruption of government, but it begins the process. It also offers the biggest bang for the effort. Overhauling the welfare state is a growing necessity but doing that is impossible in the present environment. With near zero trust in government and both parties in a state of disarray, passing difficult reform is impossible. Going for the low hanging fruit is an obvious first step.

As a final note, this is why a guy like Trump in the White House could be a boon to the political class if they decide to go down the reform road. Trump is not ideologically tied to any form of tax reform. He would be a good pitchman for whatever tax overhaul package comes out of Washington. He is already signaled his willingness to tax the financial class. He is the perfect guy to provide cover for genuine tax reform.

Reform Week Part I

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Societies go through reform in a few different ways. The most obvious way is revolution. We do not think of revolution as a reform, but it is a type of reformation. The stuff that does not work is swept away and new stuff is put in its place. The “sweeping” is often bloody as the stuff being swept is attached to people with a vested interest in it. That and every revolution is driven, in part, by revenge.

Similarly, conquest is a type of reform too. A neighboring power defeats the society, forcing it to restructure itself in response. Maybe that is as a vassal state or simply as a weak and defeated minor power as it retools for the world in which it finds itself. The Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC ushered in a period of reform that set the stage for Roman domination of the West.

The usual way in which we think of social reform is the voluntary type where changes are initiated either in response to crisis or in response to defects in the current arrangements. The changes ushered in after the 1929 stock market crash are an obvious example of reform in the face of crisis. The 12th Amendment that altered the selection of the President is an example of the ruling class fixing something that did not work as intended.

Peaceful reform does not spring from thin air. The world changes and the current arrangements no longer satisfy the needs of the people in charge. The key point here is that this sort of peaceful reform is top-down, not bottom up. It may be spurred by popular unrest, but this sort of reform is in the interests of those in charge or those just taking charge, like our technological elites who got rich in the last generation.

In America, the last big reform period was after World War II. Yankee reformers blasted away the old system for managing blacks and they replaced it with a form of riot insurance we call the Welfare State. Youth culture and the sexual revolution came at the tail end of that reform period, as the ruling elite reconfigured the majority coalition that would dominate politics for the next fifty years. Steve Sailer’s coalition of the fringes is an entirely artificial arrangement that suits the needs of the ruling class. At least it used to.

The ructions going on today in the two parties are the result of old systems no longer up to the task of meeting the challenges of the day. The current arrangements evolved in a bygone era. The Cold War is long over yet we still have a political arrangement organized around fighting the Red Menace at home and abroad. America’s foolish blundering into the Arab world is the result of a system looking for a new enemy.

Reform is long overdue.

The question is what the nature of the next reform movement will be. The reforms of the 50’s and 60’s were cultural. The country was doing simply fine economically and the large financial interests had been tamed before the war. First came the knocking down of the racial institutions, followed by new political institutions to fill the void. Then the family institutions were plowed under in the sexual revolution. Things like gay rights and tranny rights today are mostly just nostalgic echoes of those reform movements of the 70’s.

The current age is nothing like the period following World War II so it is unlikely that the coming reform period will be anything like that time. That is why the causes of this Great Progressive Awakening have seemed so silly and pointless. They are silly and pointless. The one substantive effort at economic reform, Obamacare, devolved into a festival of vengeance against Christians, traditionalists and the white middle-class. The Left’s reformist impulse has long since burned out. What’s left is just spite.

This age is much more like the period starting at the end of the 19th century and running into the early 20th when taking on the monsters of industry was the priority. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890. The Clayton Antitrust Act was passed in 1914. Of course, Teddy Roosevelt made his bones in trust busting at the turn of the century. Financial reforms followed the crash of ’29, along with additional laws like the Robinson-Patman Act to limit corporate consolidation.

If you look at the economic reforms of that generation, the goal was to limit the power and influence of new industrial barons. Concentrations of wealth are the great threat to republican government so the logical response to it is to break up the large interests. A century ago, that meant trust busting and strong limits on the economic activity of the super rich. It also means laws against the sort of reckless risk taking at the root of every financial crisis.

This time around things are a bit different, but the same problems exist. The coming period of reform will be economic, aimed at returning power to the political class. That will also mean political reforms that will be necessary to enforce the economic reforms. Again, reform is about the people in charge and the public is secondary. Even so, the brewing unrest is the opening that allows reformers to usher in changes. In the coming decades, those changes will be economic and political.

More tomorrow.

Rivers of Blood

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The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: “How can its dimensions be reduced?” Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week – and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country – and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words “for settlement.” This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party’s policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.

Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.

Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Party’s policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no “first-class citizens” and “second-class citizens.” This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it “against discrimination”, whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another’s.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her ‘phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, “Racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere in this country.” So she went home.

“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house – at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. “Racialist,” they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word “integration.” To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population – that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:

‘The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Alone in the Universe

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The Drake equation is the estimate for the number of technological civilizations that may exist in our galaxy. Astronomer Frank Drake came up with a list of specific factors that are essential to the development of intelligent life. The Wiki entry is pretty good and worth reading if you like. If you want something a little more casual, space.com has a nice article on it. The Drake equation is pretty much all the alien hunters have at the moment, given that we have zero evidence of life beyond this planet.

The reason for that is a mystery. In fact, it has a cool name as well. It is called the Fermi Paradox. There are billions of stars in the galaxy. The math says there should be millions with planets similar to earth and capable of life. That’s the paradox. The math says there should be lots of earth like planets teaming with life that has evolved for a lot longer than life on earth. Yet, as far as we know, we are alone in the universe, but we keep looking.

This story the other day is interesting.

Astronomers using the TRAPPIST telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory have discovered three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth. These worlds have sizes and temperatures similar to those of Venus and Earth and are the best targets found so far for the search for life outside the Solar System. They are the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star. The new results will be published in the journal Nature on 2 May 2016.

A team of astronomers led by Michaël Gillon, of the Institut d’Astrophysique et Géophysique at the University of Liège in Belgium, have used the Belgian TRAPPIST telescope [1] to observe the star 2MASS J23062928-0502285, now also known as TRAPPIST-1. They found that this dim and cool star faded slightly at regular intervals, indicating that several objects were passing between the star and the Earth [2]. Detailed analysis showed that three planets with similar sizes to the Earth were present.

A light year is roughly 5.9 trillion miles so these planets are roughly 240 trillion miles from earth. To put that into some perspective, let’s pretend there is intelligent life on one of these planets. They decide to let us know they are there by using a light signal of some sort to send Morse Code. By the time we received the signal and decoded it, most of the people who sent it would be dead. By the time they got our reply, they would all be dead and most the people on our end would be dead.

Traveling to these planets would be impossible for humans. The fastest space vehicle we have is the upcoming Solar Orbiter that NASA plans to launch in 2018. It will travel at 450,000 miles an hour. If that were configured to haul humans, it would arrive in the vicinity of these planets around the year 62,899. Our astronauts would not even be dust at that point.  Even assuming we can build a vehicle to reach something close to light speed, we’re still looking at having geezers showing up to the alien planet.

The other side of this is that the alien planet could have a species that has solved these technological problems. They have the ability to reach speeds in excess of light and the ability to survive in deep space for extended periods. The challenges of interstellar space travel are many orders of magnitude more difficult than anything we understand. That would most likely mean they are vastly more advanced than humans in every way.

The size of the technological gap between us and them would be something similar to modern humans and australopithecines. Our technology is amazing to us, just as sharp sticks were amazing to Australopithecus. To the people able to conquer interstellar travel, our technology would be the equivalent to the sharp stick. They will do things we cannot imagine doing, much less understand doing.

One of those things, most likely, will be the ability to conceal themselves from us. Interstellar travel will require manipulation of matter on a grand scale. Long before they figured out the Warp drive, they will have figured out how to hide from our level of technology. We’re getting pretty good at hiding from radar and the visible spectrum. Our alien visitors will certainly have expanded this ability into most of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Of course, the ability to control matter at the scales required of Warp drives means they would have the ability to control living matter as well. We like to think we’re complicated and by the standards of earth, we are complicated. By alien standards, we are single cell creatures in a water bath. They would be able to manipulate us just as easily as we control ants and roaches. For all we know, earth is just a really big terrarium anyway.

Then you have the evolutionary issues. Humans today are nothing like the humans of 200,000 years ago. Imagine what we will be like in 200,000 years. Intelligent life in a million years could very well be microscopic organisms living in silica. What if Hawking is more right than he knows and the future of intelligent life is at the smallest of small scale? That means our alien visitors could very well be a dust storm or the single facet of a snowflake.

The point here is that we are alone in the universe, as far we know and as far as we will ever know. By the time we can know otherwise, we will not be us. By the time the aliens can show up and set us straight, they will be so far advanced compared to us we will not be able to detect them anyway. For all any of us can know, we’re just a science experiment for some distant race of life. Earth is a terrarium sitting on a kid’s desk. Regardless, we are alone in this universe and we always will be alone.

Hothouse Foodies

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t watch television very much, outside of live sporting events. I have nothing against television, I just never developed the habit of following a show every week. I forget to watch and lose track of what’s happening. Then I lose interest. Binge watching works for me and I have binge watched some popular series, but years after they were on the air. The advantage with this is you can abandon the show if it sucks after a few episodes.

The one type of show that has always worked on me is the cooking show. I’m a good cook and I like seeing new stuff, but I think what really works for me is that the shows are all bullshit. The cooking contests are hilarious because the judges have on their serious face and make up all sorts of idiotic reasons for liking one dish over another. My favorite is when they say “umami” as they do that thing with their mouth to indicate they are trying to figure out the taste. Umami seems to mean “I don’t know what this is.”

Food tasting, like wine tasting, is mostly bullshit. The cooking shows make this clear as they have contestants make dishes with all sorts of wacky ingredients they would never normally use. The judges then taste the dish and talk about how something made with Velveeta has a floral notes and umami. The show Cutthroat Kitchen is the best example of this. It is an unintentional send up of the foodie rackets.

The truth is, “foodie” culture is just signalling. If you are a droll sophisticated urbanite you pretend to like food made from exotic ingredients,served on plates the size of a car door. If you are a suburban square, you eat food out of a can that you heat up over a hotplate. That’s not too much of an exaggeration. This article in Slate points out that most people are still making food at home that is similar to what you would associate with 1950’s suburbia.

And at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal. It is all, Kimball and his ilk would agree, extremely disappointing. It’s also perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of American culinary desires.

Allrecipes is the most popular English-language food website in the world. According to ComScore, last December the site got almost 50 million visits, the biggest month by any food site ever. Thanks to its mastery of search engine optimization, the site’s recipes constantly appear near the top of Google search results. If you look for “lasagna recipes,” as I did the other day, you’ll immediately find “World’s Best Lasagna,” a recipe that has been one of the website’s most popular dishes for 15 years. The recipe (which makes a perfectly tasty lasagna) was viewed more than 6 million times last year alone and has received more than 11,000 five-star ratings. In an era of celebrity chefs and recipe-kit delivery services developed by experts, a pasta dish by a Dallas dad who describes his heritage as “entirely Anglo-Saxon” is quite possibly America’s most-cooked meal.

This reminds me of something from the dark ages. In the early 90’s newspapers were struggling so they brought in experts to figure out what was wrong. A newspaper in Ohio, it was reported, discovered that their readers never looked at the food section. The reason for that was the stuff covered in the food section was all haute cuisine, while the readers were eating Hamburger Helper and mushroom soup casserole. Put another way, the paper was trying to serve an audience that did not exist.

The food rackets are a good example of the great divide in America. People watch TV to escape and be entertained. I’ll watch the cooking shows because they make me laugh. Once in a blue moon I’ll learn something useful or interesting, but mostly is is a goof. Similarly, people are not watching Game of Thrones for deep, philosophic insights into the human condition. People like boobies, midgets and sword play. Throw in some corny drama and cool costumes and you have a hit show.

On the other side of the screen, the little people inside the box, that’s where things get weird. They actually believe their bullshit. The “foodies” on the cooking shows are starting to think they are leading a food revolution, when they are just a different type of clown, entertaining the masses. Our news media for a long time has be operating under the delusion that they are a secular priesthood, sent here to guard the truth for the masses. In reality, they are just paid spokesman for their bosses.

One way to understand why Trump was able to vanquish his enemies so easily is to think about that newspaper in Ohio I mentioned. At some point, they stumbled into a monopoly. They were the only newspaper in town. That meant they were no longer subject to the normal market forces that come with competition and the result was a slow decay in their quality as they indulged in one fad after another. The newspaper became a weird hothouse growing things that could never live outside.

A similar thing has happened to our entertainment rackets and our politics. Cable is essentially a monopoly. ESPN gets $8 a month from 150 million homes in America whether they watch or not and about 80% do not watch. That lets ESPN engage in deranged jackassery like tranny rights campaigns. The Food Network is on basic and gets a buck a month from cable fees. You can put on all sorts of weird food shows when you start with a guaranteed billion dollar revenue stream.

That’s what has happened with our politics, I think. For the last three decades, at least, it has been a closed system with no real competition. Both sides debated how much socialism and cultural Marxism they would inflict on the country. The Left would open the debate at 10 and the Right would offer 5 and they would settle in between. That’s how we went from telling AIDS jokes to jailing Christian bakers in the blink of eye. There was never a competition.

Nature abhors the lack of competition. The newspaper monopolies collapsed as soon as the hothouse doors were swung open. The inevitable break up of cable bundling will vaporize much of what we currently have on our television systems. Our politics, of course, is facing a similar threat. The hothouse doors have been flung open and many of the prettiest flowers on display have wilted. The Titum Arum opposing Trump is suddenly facing conditions for which it was not designed.

The Warning Shot

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One of the more irritating things about the current election is the obtuseness of the media, particularly the so-called conservative media. They insist on assigning motives to Trump voters that are at odds with observable reality. For months now the official narrative has been that Trump is powered by toothless hillbillies, high on meth and anger at the dusky fellows. Voting Trump is how these losers are lashing out in anger, always in anger. Never mind that the data says the opposite.

The narrative, coincidentally, always speaks to the wonderfulness of conservative media. Similarly, they tar Trump with every offense to decency, even though he is often saying the things these same conservatives used to say a decade or two ago. According to the modern conservative, anyone holding the opinions common a few decades ago is a monster. Hilariously, Trump’s lack of a political ambition is held against him by conservatives. Again, the critique is always about the critic in these cases.

That’s the cynical interpretation. These people know better, but choose to lie in order to flatter themselves and their owners. Another way to look at it though, and part of why Trump exists, is that these people and the entirely of the ruling class are divorced from reality. They live in their bunkered communities, work with other managerial types and spend their days agreeing with one another about their wonderfulness. To them, the status quo is fabulous. Why would anyone want to change it?

This story from the Imperial Capital is a good example of the blinkered nature of our elites.

Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are quietly launching a new effort to expand visas for low-skilled foreign workers in government funding bills — a push that could drive a deep ideological rift through both parties later this year.

Republicans and Democrats whose home states rely on immigrant labor are lobbying top appropriators to include language in this year’s funding bills to renew controversial provisions from last year’s omnibus spending measure that effectively quadrupled the number of low-skilled worker visas.

Nine House lawmakers, led by Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), sent a letter last week urging the Appropriations Committee to keep those higher numbers intact. And key senators have already begun to discuss the issue.

“Many businesses will be severely impacted, and some may be unable to operate, without this cap relief,” said the House letter, obtained by POLITICO and addressed to Reps. John Carter (R-Texas) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), who head the panel that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security. “Failure to enact this exemption will hurt seasonal businesses across the country.”

The program in question is the H-2B visa, which covers immigrants who work as landscapers, housekeepers and seafood processors. Those visas are legally capped at 66,000 per year, which pro-business advocates say is an artificially low number that could harm key U.S. industries.

We have two primaries going on in which immigration is the defining issues. On the one side, the guy promising to build a wall and bar Muslims from entry crushed the field, despite being outspent a million-to-one. On the other side, the old-time socialist, who preaches worker’s rights and obliquely opposes the immigration lobbies, is making life hell for the party candidate. If Sanders went back to his old anti-immigration ways, he would run the table on Crooked Hillary.

Despite this year long news story, the politicians and their backers in both parties want to increase immigration! Obama is violating Federal law so he can import hundreds of thousands of Islamic terrorists. You could be forgiven if you started to wonder if these people actually hate you. How is it possible to be this blind to daily reality in America? It’s as if these people live on another planet and pop in every once in a while to stage a political show.

I’m fond of pointing out that all you have to do is spend a little time with grad students at an elite university to understand why Mao sent these people off the rice paddies. They manage to combine wrongheadedness with smug condescension to the point where you want to smash them in the face. I suspect a corollary here is that you can understand the French Revolution by spending a few minutes following American politics. A normal man wants “to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

This is why Trump exists. It’s never been about Trump, what he says or what he promises to do. That’s just the glitter on the stripper. The Trumpening is about the people in charge and their callous disregard for their duties and the country they allegedly serve. It’s as if the voting public went out and found the one guy who most offends the ruling class. Trump is a more polished version of Chuck Tingle and the voters are the Rabid Puppies. It’s not about voting for something as much as it is voting against something.

Trump is the warning shot. He’s the food riots before the revolution. He’s the stack of letters to the editor in protest over some issue. People do not go from happy to bloody revolt overnight. It’s a process and the early stages are warnings, at least they should be viewed as warnings. If the people in Washington insist on flooding the country with helot labor, despite what’s happening in the election, the people are going to insist on building scaffolds in Washington. The Trump phenomenon is the warning.

The Point of Life

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What is best in life? Obviously, it is to crush your enemies. See them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women. Alternatively, according to John Derbyshire, “The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

I’m kidding, sort of, but figuring out what is the point, the goal of life, is not an unimportant topic. Libertarians tell us the point of life is to be ground up into dog food because that’s efficient. Liberals tell us the point of life is the struggle. A meaningful life is one spent struggling against the natural order. Buckley Conservatives no longer contemplate this question as it could offend the Left.

One reason our politics are a dumpster fire in the West is no one bothers to ask, “to what end?” Read the stories about the Muslim invasion of Europe, for example, and you never see anyone asking the current non-Muslim rulers why they are doing these things. What’s the point? How does this benefit Europeans? There’s never a reason given. It’s as if there is no point. They are just killing time until something else comes along.

The void of pointlessness has been filled by the cult of economics, who claim the point of man’s existence is to make really cool looking pivot tables. Make Excel happy and utopia arrives. The debate here over trade was tinged with that vibe. Trade with Mexico is good because Walmart has cheap crap. This assumes that life in America was a hellhole in 1985, because we had less cheap crap. Does anyone’s plan for their life include “get more cheap crap” under the list of life goals?

It’s why arguments for or against trade and immigration based on math miss the point. These are not math problems. There’s no uniformly right answer. The math can help inform opinion, but ultimately social policy is about how people choose to live. The point of life for the Amish is going to be different than for Scots-Irish woodsmen in West Virginia. You see that here in this story about a small Nebraska town.

Half-ton pickup trucks crowd the curb outside the One Horse Saloon, a neon Coors Light sign in the window and rib-eye steaks on the menu, but otherwise Nickerson, Nebraska, is nearly silent on a spring evening, with only rumbling freight trains interrupting bird songs.

Regional economic development officials thought it was the perfect spot for a chicken processing plant that would liven up the 400-person town with 1,100 jobs, more than it had ever seen. When plans leaked out, though, there was no celebration, only furious opposition that culminated in residents packing the fire hall to complain the roads couldn’t handle the truck traffic, the stench from the plant would be unbearable and immigrants and out-of-towners would flood the area, overwhelming schools and changing the town’s character.

“Everyone was against it,” said Jackie Ladd, who has lived there for more than 30 years. “How many jobs would it mean for people here? Not many.”

The village board unanimously voted against the proposed $300 million plant, and two weeks later, the company said they’d take their plant — and money — elsewhere.

Deep-rooted, rural agricultural communities around the U.S. are seeking economic investments to keep from shedding residents, but those very places face trade-offs that increasing numbers of those who oppose meat processing plants say threaten to burden their way of life and bring in outsiders.

“Maybe it’s just an issue of the times in which we live in which so many people want certain things but they don’t want the inconveniences that go with them,” said Chris Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors.

The default assumption here and everywhere in the mass media is that the point of life is economic growth. It’s as if there can be only two modes. One is pedal to the metal, sacrifice everything for economic growth, even if that means erasing the entire culture. The other mode is North Korea style isolationism and backwardness, where people are paranoid of outsiders and refuse to embrace modernity.

Of course, the real issue here is “who? whom?”

Nickerson fought against Georgia-based Lincoln Premium Poultry, which wanted to process 1.6 million chickens a week for warehouse chain Costco. It was a similar story in Turlock, California, which turned down a hog-processing plant last fall, and Port Arthur, Texas, where residents last week stopped a meat processing plant. There also were complaints this month about a huge hog processing plant planned in Mason City, Iowa, but the project has moved ahead.

The Nickerson plant would have helped area farmers, who mostly grow corn and soybeans, start up poultry operations and buy locally grown grain for feed, said Willow Holliback, who lives 40 miles away and heads an agriculture group that backed the proposal.

“When farmers are doing well, the towns are doing well,” she said.

The question of who would work the tough jobs was at the forefront of the debate, though many were adamant they aren’t anti-immigrant. Opposition leader Randy Ruppert even announced: “This is not about race. This is not about religion.”

Thanks to 50 years of Buckley Conservatism, standing up for you own is assumed to be a hate crime so everyone is conditioned to volunteer that they are not a racist or Christian. I look forward to the day when a white Christian can once again be proud of civilization.

But both were raised at the raucous April 4 meeting where the local board rejected the plant. One speaker said he’d toured a chicken processing plant elsewhere and felt nervous because most of the workers were minorities.

More overtly, John Wiegert, from nearby Fremont where two meat processors employ many immigrants, questioned whether Nickerson’s plant would attract legal immigrants from Somalia— more than 1,000 of whom have moved to other Nebraska cities for similar jobs, along with people from Mexico, Central America and Southeast Asia.

“Being a Christian, I don’t want Somalis in here,” Wiegert, who has led efforts to deny rental housing to immigrants in the country illegally, told the crowd. “They’re of Muslim descent. I’m worried about the type of people this is going to attract.”

Others pointed out that, given Nebraska’s unemployment rate is among the nation’s lowest near 3 percent, few local residents would accept the entry-level jobs. While the projected wage of $13 to $17 an hour was above the region’s current median wage for production workers, opponents argued meat processors generally have high turnover.

This really is the crux of the matter. The “American” company building these plants is about as American as the People’s Liberation Army of China. The owners of that company have no allegiance to America or Americans. The proof of that is their overwhelming desire to import Somalis as workers in their plants. To them, Nebraska may as well be a dead planet they can mine for its resources. America means nothing to them.

That’s the core of the new way we have to view the world. There’s us and them. The overclass gathering for their festival in Vegas should understand that the rest of us owe them nothing. They are on their own. It would be nice if the overclass was thankful and patriotic, dedicated to protecting the society that made their life possible. That’s not the case. They are just a collection of buccaneers with no loyalty to anyone. We have to return the favor.

The Monasteries of America

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Saint Fionán is claimed to have founded the Skellig Michael monastery in the sixth century. There is some dispute about when the monastery was founded, but it is largely considered one of the first Catholic centers of learning outside of Rome. There, the monks copied old texts, taught novices to read and write and proselytized to the Irish heathens. Slowly, monasteries were founded around Europe, doing the same work, often on behalf of the ruling families.

If you are an ancient history buff, one of the things you probably understand is just how important the Catholic Church was in preserving and maintaining the knowledge of the ancients. Throughout the Middle Ages, tucked away in monasteries, monks spent their days copying and preserving texts from antiquity. It was a slow and tedious process, but it was the only way to preserve and proliferate knowledge.

That last bit is important. Storing up knowledge in books at a monastery is fine but passing them around so others can learn and expand upon what is in those books is how civilization flourishes. Those monks copying old texts were increasing the mass of human understanding. Copying Aristotle meant that the copy could be sent to another monastery to be read and copied again. It also meant more men exposed to Aristotle, and not just in the monasteries. The nobility was able to build libraries too.

The thing about the medieval system was that it was tightly bound by Catholicism on one end and the state on the other. Intellectual life had to appeal to the king and the Church. In this regard, the Church served another key role. They vetted and filtered the books that were produced; thus, they controlled the knowledge of the society. The crown may have had a monopoly of force, but the Church gave it legitimacy and an intellectual structure through which to rule.

We like to think that the modern age is a time when information flows freely around society, unencumbered by the state or powerful interests. Colleges and universities are endlessly going on about having free speech and open debate. Journalists insist their job is to speak truth to power, which means saying things that are outside the approved list of truths. Even so-called conservatives bang on about the glories of free and open dialogue, usually while they denounce Donald Trump.

The truth is the monastery system is still with us. Instead of the crown financing the learning centers, it is billionaires, corporations, non-governmental organizations and international bodies. Instead of monasteries, we have think-tanks, research centers and foundations. All of which are “not for profit” which means contributions are tax deductible. The rich pay themselves for supporting the organizations that exist to promote the interests of the rich and powerful.

All around Washington DC, there are organizations, like American Enterprise Institute, that are financed by rich people to pump out papers, books, commentary and experts to populate TV and radio. If you look at their 990 filing, you see that the guy in charge made $700K in compensation. Board members made six figures, with most in the mid-200’s. Charles Murray made $270K just from this one job. His books, speaking fees and so forth probably double that number. Being a “thinker” pays well.

AEI is a big foot operation, but there many smaller ones too. The Fund for American Studies funds journalists and reporters with grants. The list of programs on their 990 is mostly benign stuff that sounds nice. Then you see the long list of trustees. The one name that jumps out is Fred Barnes who took $25K for his troubles. One of the benefits of being a journalist, who plays ball, is you get to sit on boards at these non-profits. Some pay more than others, but it is easy to see how it can add up.

Then there are the magazine rackets. National Review has a thing called the National Review Institute. Notice how they always call their people “fellow” to give it that academic feel. Their 990 is not remarkably interesting, but NRI is mostly a clearing house. The director makes $200K a year, in case you are curious. That is small potatoes compared to John Podhoretz, who takes over $400K in salary from Commentary Magazine, another non-profit operation.

Of course, it is not just indigenous billionaires paying these people to promote them in the press. Foreign governments get in on the act too. The government of Malaysia famously bought favorable coverage from conservative media a few years ago. You may recognize the name Ben Domenech from that article. He writes for the Federalist and was in on the anti-Trump crusade. He also got jammed up in a plagiarism scandal, yet he somehow remains in good standing with conservative media.

My favorite, I think, is Brent Bozell, who Mike Cernovich has been going after on Twitter. Bozell runs a racket called the Media research Center. It is supposed to police the media for bias. Brent makes $400K for his trouble, that’s when he is not penning anti-Trump pieces for Breitbart. No one should begrudge Bozell his money, but when the media watchdog is paid by the same people funding the media, it is hard to take him seriously.

The reality is our opinion makers are all kept men. They are the monks and clergy of our age, shaping intellectual life and setting the limits of what is and what is not permitted in the public sphere. This is done mostly to promote their own position, but financed by the donor class, on whose behalf the monks and priests of the commentariat work. When you are living the 1% lifestyle, you are not about to rock the boat by speaking truth to power.

The reason they are fainting over Trump and the rise of the Alt-Right is the same reason the Church panicked over Martin Luther. The difference is Jan Hus is an army of bloggers and writers on-line using the megaphones of social media. Trump, like Frederick III, is legitimizing much of it by speaking candidly on the issues of the day. Just as Trump supporters have no illusions about what Trump is as a politician, the commentariat is fully aware of what he represents, which is why he must be destroyed.

The Myth of Free Trade

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Fred_Z Writes:

Even so, Trump’s anti-global, anti-trade protectionist rhetoric is quite mad. I like his anti-illegal immigration stance, but that is the only thing that makes sense to economically protect Americans. The American middle and lower classes are not being ravaged by globalism and free trade, they are being ravaged by wage competition from illegals and insane government environmental, regulatory, tax and subsidy policies.

How does Trump expect us to buy your exports if you refuse to buy our exports? David Ricard showed nearly 200 years ago that free trade benefits both sides, even if the other party is dumping below costs, and there is literally no credible counter-argument. Besides, you Yanks are utterly notorious for distorting dozens of markets, from sugar to corn, with ludicrous tax and subsidy policies.

Ah well, may we live in interesting times.

If I were going to list the things that have unraveled conservatism over the last thirty years, the embrace of libertarian trade myths would be high on the list. Trade has become a sacred item in the commentariat that can never be questioned and never be worshiped too much. Even the Left has found it impossible to make arguments against trade deals, instead embracing the globalism of their donors. It’s part of what has motivated Progressive support for Sanders over Clinton.

As is the case with so much of our current politics, trade is no longer a policy to be debated. You either fully support “free trade” or you are dismissed from the conversation. A similar thing happened with immigration over the years. All of the immigration skeptics were purged from the public square, leaving two types of immigration enthusiasts. You either hate white people or you are a shill for the cheap labor lobbies. Trade has followed the same path.

Despite the moralizing, trade is like any other policy. It is about trade-offs. There are benefits from lowering trade barriers, thus increasing trade between countries. There are liabilities that come from liberalized trade too. A good trade policy minimizes these costs so that the result is a net benefit. Bad trade policy fails to address the cost side and is a net negative. There is no free lunch, even with trade. There is always a cost side to every public policy.

Opening up trade with Canada, for example, hurts the America beaver pelt industry. Putting American beaver trappers out of work has consequences. Low cost Canadian beaver hunters will take market share from the Americans. Those workers will be let go, thus adding a cost to America. If those workers can be soaked up by a business that booms due to trade to Canada, then we very well may have a net benefit to America. If not, then not.

Trade with countries like Canada makes a lot of sense because Canada has things we want and we have things they want. Canada is culturally very similar to America, speaks the same language and maintains the same legal traditions. Trade between the two countries will require little additional policing as businesses on both sides have similar expectations of conduct. A Canadian firm that violates US law will show up in the US court to answer for it. Additionally, businesses on both sides know the governments of both sides will enforce the law equally.

On the other hand, trade with Mexico is a different animal entirely. Mexico is much poorer, lacks our cultural traditions and has a highly corrupt government. The reason American firms setup shop in Mexico is to avoid US labor and environmental laws. Carrier is not moving to Mexico because it is better. They are moving there because it is worse, thus allowing them to get away with things that would never be allowed to do in the Anglosphere. If the Mexican government complains, a small bribe solves the problem.

That’s the reality of trade with Mexico. It’s not the indigenous tortilla maker selling us tortillas so he can buy software and legal services from the US. “Trade” with Mexico is a variation of the sort of slavery that unraveled the Roman Republic. Instead of rich businesses bringing slaves in to work, they take the work to the slaves, all for the purpose of undermining their smaller competitors in the domestic market, who cannot afford to exploit the same rules.

Trade with Mexico has largely been a game of cost shifting. Other than weed and meth, Mexico is incapable of producing much of anything other than excess people. Trade deals with Mexico, however, have allowed global enterprise to shift their cost of doing business onto the American middle-class through declining wages, higher taxes and social instability. “Free trade” with Mexico has some real benefits to Americans, but it brings real costs too, costs that outweigh the benefits.

When you look at trade with China, the cost side starts to fill up with all sorts of indirect items. How much has Chinese hacking, theft and piracy cost America? I know a firm that has spent millions to keep China from pirating their product. A trick China uses is to flood the market with a sub-standard version of an American product, thus damaging the reputation of the American firm. How many dogs and cats were killed by Chinese pet food additives? How much will it cost us to defend Japan and Taiwan from Chinese aggression?

The point here is that trade is a good thing, but only when it is a net positive to the American people as a whole. Deals that allow plutocrats to shift their costs to the public so they can privatize profits are not good deals. Trump pointing that out does not make him a protectionist. It makes him a realist. It’s the innumerate phonies, clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, desperately trying to shut off these debates, who are divorced from reality. Trade, like all pubic policy, is about trade-offs. Those trade-offs are debated in a healthy society.