Monday, March 5, 2018

Ebeling: Trump's Economic Ignorance



Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

My latest article on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation is on, “Trump’s Protectionist Follies Threaten a Trade War.”

President Donald Trump has announced his intention, with executive authority, to impose new, protectionist tariffs on steel and aluminum, and seems to be digging in his heels even in the face of opposition by prominent Republicans and threats of retaliation by the governments of other countries around the world.

He is once again showing his degree of economic ignorance in failing to understand that trade deficits do not mean “harm” to a nation importing more from than it exports to various trading partners. Or that such a protectionist policies inescapably mean economic harm to far more of the citizens of the United States than any misplaced attempt to benefit a special interest group.

Trump seems to not understand that in one way or another, the balance of trade between the United States and the rest of the world always balance. It may be in the form of goods and services bought and sold, or through financial and investment flows. But the debts and credits, properly recorded and calculated, always balance at the bottom of a country’s economic “page.”

Following the path he seems determined to go down, President Trump’s protectionist policies can only lead to global hostility, economic instability, and worsening standards of living than otherwise need be the case, if a regime of free trade was pursued instead.
 https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/trumps-protectionist-follies-threaten-trade-war/

Best,
Richard 

1 comment:

  1. ──Ebeling: Trump's Economic Ignorance──

    I really thought after reading that headline that Richard had tasked himself with writing something that would end up being as monumental as Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. But, perhaps fortunately for Richard, he limited himself with only one small, albeit not less important, aspect of Trump's incredibly vast lack of knowledge of economics, which is "Trump's Protectionist Follies".

    That is the man that Trumpistas chose for their dear leader. May all have to fall on their swords for him, or at least as a great Darwin Award-winning culling of the herd, before the world is turned into a cinder.

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