Tag Archives: markets

The Freedom Caucus of No

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Daniel Henninger had some thoughts in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on this group’s first 100 days; read the whole thing.  I’m interested in one aspect of the No-ers’ first 100 days that Henninger was too polite to say out loud.  Henninger pointed out

Back in 2016, Speaker Paul Ryan and the House leadership held public hearings, conducted negotiations inside the House conference, and published texts of the proposed legislation to repeal and reform ObamaCare. The American Health Care Act that emerged from this process had both a political and policy purpose.

Its political purpose was to create a bill that could survive the House, survive the Senate, survive a conference and make it to Mr Trump’s desk to fulfill one of his and the party’s biggest political promises.

The policy purpose was to lay a foundation on which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and his SWAT team of reformers, such as Indiana Medicaid specialist Seema Verma, could help Congress clean up the rest of ObamaCare over the next two years—moving away from the 2010 law’s 2,000 pages of legal babel and toward a market-based system.

But no (to coin a phrase).

The Freedom Caucus rose to say none of these pieces of the president’s legislative agenda could move forward until it got what it wanted: elimination of ObamaCare’s 10 essential health benefits.

The No-ers didn’t hold out for this sort of thing during those prior negotiations.  No, they waited until the American Health Care Act was before the public, hoping to extort concessions from President Trump and/or from their supposed fellow Republicans in the House.

The No-ers, with their behavior, have betrayed their own constituents by sticking them with continued Obamacare, a steaming swamp these persons have been pretending to want to get rid of.

If the Freedom Caucus of No welched on their 2016 agreement regarding health care, how can they be trusted with anything today?

Free Markets

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President Donald Trump revived his tough talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement Tuesday, warning Canada it must stop protecting its dairy farmers from US competition.

Canada’s trade policy, after all, manages dairy production through a quota system (which is anathema in itself to a free market, but that’s mostly a Canadian domestic problem), and it seriously impedes foreign competition with tariffs designed for the task.

Circularly, Canada controls dairy prices by matching them to “average” production costs, and then controls production by setting allowed quotas.  With prices thus under government control, Canada sets tariffs to achieve prices for imports of foreign dairy products that aren’t competitive.

Of course, there’s a flip side to this: the US must stop shielding American farmers from the United States’ own free market and eliminate Big Government price supports for dairy and other farm products as well as corn price support achieved via ethanol mandates.

Good luck with either.

Obamacare

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As The Wall Street Journal rightly pointed out, regarding the failed Obamacare repeal and replacement effort and the failing renewed discussions between the House Republican Conference and the Freedom Caucus of No,

The fury…suggests that some Freedom Caucus opposition is more cynical than sincere. Do its members want to appear to negotiate in good faith but insist on changes that centrists can’t accept, so they can then accuse centrists of killing the reform revival?

And

…perhaps there’s still hope for health-care reform. But first Republicans have to decide if they can accept progress that is short of perfection. If they can’t, then they’ll blow their best, and maybe only, shot at repealing and replacing a failing entitlement.

Here’s the problem, though: the Freedom Caucus of No already has betrayed their constituents once through that first failure by inflicting on them continued Obamacare instead of an improved system because the improvements weren’t perfection.

For how long will the No-ers continue to betray their employers? The No-ers are carefully eliding the back half of Reagan’s remark about half a loaf: come back tomorrow for the rest. Of course, that requires accepting the first half first….

Trade Barriers

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Since the meeting between PRC President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump is a matter of concern these days, and the trade negotiations that are part of that meeting also are a matter of concern, herewith a concern of my own.

Maybe this is the right time for the two leaders to cut a deal to slash Chinese trade barriers.

The three biggest PRC trade barriers are these:

  • the PRC’s demand for government backdoors into American foundational software used by companies wanting to do business in the PRC
  • the PRC’s demand that American companies “partner” with PRC companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC
  • the PRC’s parallel demand that American companies transfer American technology to those “partners”

Absent removal of these barriers, no other barrier removal matters.  Absent removal of these barriers, no deal with the PRC should be concluded.

Contrasts

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As the Trump administration begins to shape its policy on drugs, tension is growing between a treatment-focused approach, embodied in a new commission on opioids headed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and the aggressive prosecution of drug crimes promised by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

There need there be no tension because there is no contradiction.  The two approaches—nail hard those who prey on the vulnerable and the addicted—and working to free the addicted from the controls of their addiction (“free from the controls” because an addict never loses his addiction; he can only reach a point where he can say reliably, “not today.”  That’s where current medical technology has us) rather than simply jailing them, too, potentiate each other.

But what about the user who pushes, also?  He certainly needs help getting his addiction under control, and jail won’t help that.  But he also deserves jail for that preying on his fellow addicts—he knows firsthand the damage he’s doing.  But the two can occur sequentially.