Tag Archives: political economy

In a Contest of Tariffs

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In a piece purporting to show Where the Trade Battle Hurts the Most, Julie Wernau and Ira Iosebashvili had this comment:

Renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement are being closely watched in Canada, too. The Trump administration has used threats of auto tariffs to win concessions from Canada and Mexico, a strategy that hasn’t sat well with the two countries.

President Donald Trump also offered them, and the rest of the G-7, a regime of no tariffs at all. Their refusal even to discuss the offer doesn’t sit well with those of us outside the NLMSM.

A Thought on Auto Tariffs

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is worried about auto tariffs.  They do make a fair case concerning the national security aspect of our automobile industry (while eliding the fact that industry includes many more car companies than just GM, Ford, and Chrysler—and that none of them manufacture cars in the US, while all of them assemble cars in the US from imported parts).

They weaken, fatally IMNSHO, their argument, though, when they present only one aspect of the case for/against auto tariffs or the threat of significant increases in already extant auto tariffs.  In particular, the Editorial Board has carefully elided the fact that the Trump administration and German auto manufacturers have agreed in principle to a no-auto-tariff-at-all regime.

Now it’s on the German government and Brussels to agree.  It’s likely, although not certain, that plans to impose a 20% tariff on auto imports from the EU had an impact in moving the German companies toward eliminating tariffs altogether.

A no-auto-tariff regime also would render the security beef moot, but some folks on the Left don’t want that.

Business Models Don’t Create Business Rights

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There’s a lot about which to criticize California, but in one case, early though it is, the State appears to be on the right track.  California passed a consumer privacy law, and businesses everywhere are in an uproar over it.  The bill

requires [businesses] to offer consumers options to opt out of sharing personal information, and it gives Californians the right to prohibit the sale of their personal data.

Business’ objections center on their premise that it

risked far-reaching damage to everything from retailers’ customer-loyalty programs to data gathering by Silicon Valley tech giants.

This is that business model granting rights to business foolishness.  The claimed damage to customer-loyalty programs is especially rich.  If the business earned customers’ loyalty with actual quality goods and services and actual customer service in response to the inevitable problems that arise, the need for loyalty programs would be lessened.  The still-useful loyalty programs would be easier to sell from that demonstrated quality performance.  Beyond that, businesses could make the perks of joining the program more visible, more actually usable—and do better at tailoring them to individual, or small groups of, customers.  Of course, that last would require collecting customer data, but they might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome of a customer-customizable set of personal data to give access to—and by saying “pretty please” instead of demanding broad-ranging data as a condition of doing business.

The tech companies are being disingenuous, too.  They have yet to demonstrate a need for the wide-ranging data they take without permission; they just say “we need it” without discriminating their claimed need from their obvious “we want.”  And they demand it as a condition of doing business, again refusing the simple courtesy of “pretty please” and the tailoring of the data they want as well as legitimately need.

David French, National Retail Federation Senior Vice President of Government Relations worried, with a straight face, about customers and personalized marketing campaigns.

The consumer will actually be the big loser.

Not this customer.  I object to personalized marketing campaigns aimed at me.  These folks don’t know what I’m in the market for; my past buys are no indication of my current or future needs.  Nor do I want my browsing circumscribed by what offers of what I bought yesterday.  I want the full range of what’s available.  I especially don’t need my time wasted with efforts to create a need or a want where none exists.  I won’t be losing anything by not being inundated with personalized “advertising.”

It’s early, but the law looks like a good start.

Pick One

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Tony James, Blackstone Executive Vice Chairman, thinks his Progressive-Democratic Party needs to become a party of growth and inclusive prosperity.

The problem is that the Party is a Progressive one and becoming a socialist one.  This is not contradictory; the two ideologies are political allies if not siblings, too, and they’re not far apart economically.  The Party’s embrace of the former is demonstrated by Barack Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY), Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA), Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA), newly ascendant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY), and a host of others’ loud and enthusiastic embrace of progressivism.  The Party’s embrace of the latter is demonstrated by the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) and Ocasio-Cortez’ socialism within Party circles.

But progressivism is inherently exclusionary.  Progressivism insists that ordinary Americans are morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [their] responsibilities as…democrat[s], and so we must be instructed and led by our Betters.  We must be excluded from the heady responsibilities of governance and of economic independence.  More, those proud Progressives have proclaimed us ordinary Americans to be irredeemably deplorable homophobic misogynist racists, and all of us Middle Americans in flyover country are just bitter Bible-clinging gun-toters.  These proud Progressives and their acolytes on the Left openly act on this exclusionary attitude with their constant harassment of those of us who are so impertinent (if not outright dishonest) as to disagree with them, with their overt calls to bar those of us not toeing the Party’s line from public places, and with the violence with which they threaten us and often inflict against us, whom they’ve termed fascists and Nazis.

Socialism is inherently anti-growth.  These adherents demand to set all performance goals, for everyone, from the hallowed halls of government instead of a free market doing so for us as individuals and owners/operators of our private enterprises.  Their demand for equal outcomes necessarily caps growth by sapping the abilities of the best among us because others can’t—or won’t—keep up and by denying the ability of any of us to to show the best that there is in [us] and to maximize our personal prosperity, which of necessity maximizes the prosperity of all of us.  These socialists demand to raise our taxes—to take our money—and to give—give!—Medicare to all, Federally guaranteed jobs to all, thereby reducing growth capacity by taking money away from us.

The Party can have a pro-growth platform, or it can be progressive socialist; the two are mutually contradictory.

For the Progressive-Democratic Party to become an inclusive, pro-growth party, though, it must remake itself 180 degrees away from where it currently, proudly stands: it must recreate itself a party of conservatism.

That’s an impossible task for progressive socialists.

A Related Note

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I wrote recently about the Court’s ruling on Janus v AFCME Council 31, which eliminated public service unions’ ability to collect “agency fees” from non union members.

The dissent by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by her three cohorts in the Court’s liberal wing is instructive, and it foreshadows the kind of government we can expect from today’s “liberals,” should they succeed in gaining control of one or both Houses of Congress and then of the White House.

Its decision will have large-scale consequences. Public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support. State and local governments that thought fair-share provisions furthered their interests will need to find new ways of managing their workforces. Across the country, the relationships of public employees and employers will alter in both predictable and wholly unexpected ways.

Because unions are entitled to OPM for their financial support.  Because governments will be temporarily inconvenienced in their role as employers.  Because employment relationships must never be disrupted or altered.  It’s settled.

And

The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life—for over 40 years.

By this logic, Kagan would argue that Plessy v Ferguson, which created the racism of separate-but-equal in our schools (among other places), never should have been rejected by Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, because the latter came 60 years after Plessy had become “entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life.”

And these [citations omitted]:

And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.

 

Every one of them will now need to come up with new ways—elaborated in new statutes—to structure relations between government employers and their workers.

 

Still more, thousands of current contracts covering millions of workers provide for agency fees. Usually, this Court recognizes that “[c]onsiderations in favor of stare decisis are at their acme in cases involving property and contract rights.”  It prevents the parties from fulfilling other commitments they have made based on those agreements. It forces the parties—immediately—to renegotiate once-settled terms and create new tradeoffs.

This is an especially dangerous principle of the Left: that the convenience of Government is more important, and should have precedence over, individual liberty.  That forced static-ness is better than the freewheeling interactions of free men and women dealing with each other (and their employers from time to time) according to their own imperatives rather than Government diktat.  (Aside: Kagan also cynically overstated the immediacy of renegotiations.  No such thing is mandated; those contracts will expire on their own and can be renegotiated at that time—as has been the case in Wisconsin.)

And: that it’s somehow wrong that judges should be “unleashed” to uphold our basic, inherent in our very existence, liberties.  It’s not the Conservative wing of the Court that has sought to weaponize the 1st Amendment by insisting that free speech and free association are what Government says they are.

The ruling, with Kagan’s dissent, can be seen here.