Insightful, as always. I don't think the Trump plus Vance phenomenon is that hard to understand, nor is it unique to the US by any means. Neither Trump nor Vance made the New Right. [Yes, the lights are going on all over Europe, too.] The New Right made Trump, and he presciently chose Vance. [The New Right also made Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and, yes Alice Weidel. I'm not mentioning many others.]
The New Right are the new forgotten men, and their wives and children. No, they are nowhere anything near classical liberals, no one is really, [though strangely the AfD was founded by such]. The New Right has learned that the State giveth and the State taketh away. The New Right everywhere has found that the State giveth to some and taketh from them.
The established political parties have reacted the same way everywhere: Demonize the New Right. Presumably because that's all they have as an argument. Ignore the political problem. I've always been amused when a left party condemns populism. What is really meant is that populists should be left wing because populism is left wing!
Reminds me of a poem by Bert Brecht, himself a commie:
Would it not in that case be simpler
for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
--Bert Brecht, The Solution, 1953. Published 1959.
Apologies, I've been seething at this stuff at an increasing intensity for some years.
I don't have much use for government, period, but if anything would push me to vote for Trump or other "far right" candidates, it's the way the media demonize them as "far right", "neo nazi", "fascist", "literally Hitler". Just as with climate catastrophe, wokism, and the rest, when all they do is spout rhetoric and lies, I begin to suspect the truth must be elsewhere.
Funny, I thought of that quote myself when reading David's post. If the US elites could simply replace the current population with one more fitting their goals (I assume a mixture of a small but extremely competent elite who are experts and then a large enough underclass to maintain society) I suspect that they would. The middle class doesn't seem to be of much use to them, and our lower classes are unruly and unskilled. Better to replace them with 3rd world poor or the world's general elite. Such a society would likely be extremely rich, but I find myself unable to sign on even if I would be among the wealthy.
If it were possible to elect a President who would work for free trade and small government, he would have my vote like a shot. But 90% or more of America doesn’t want that, so we are left asking which party comes closest. To me that seems clear.
That's exactly how I think. I submitted my mail-in ballot for Trump/Vance a few weeks ago. My emotions are much more along the lines of what David posted a short while ago: The Democrats, well, the Left, are my Out group. Trump/Vance are my Far group. When they do well, I feel good. An In group I hardly have. Well, there are those seven classical liberals hiding out in the suburbs of DC, where I live. I don't even have their fax numbers!
I think your analysis is reasonable. All I can think is, how long has it been since there was a politician who has thought deeply enough about such issues to be worthy of detailed analysis at all? Even if Vance is getting some of this stuff wrong, he is obviously intelligent and giving these matters consideration. If you sat with him, I think he would have responses to you and might even change his mind at the margins. Now think of Harris/Walz. No comparison.
That was my impression of Newt Gingrich. I somehow got on a mailing list for cassette tapes of talks he gave and concluded that he would be a fun person to have sitting next to me on a long flight.
Of the four candidates I expect Vance would be the most interesting to talk with.
I vaguely recall he was hauled before some House Committee for earning a bit on the side, including for making those tapes. Even his political opponents thought the tapes were very good! Those were the days.
I can't say much about Gingrich* but I remember Dan Carlin (I think in episode 150) made that comment as well as in regardless of one's opinion of Newt's politics, he was effective, a thinker, and both highly articulate and never a bore to speak with.
“All I can think is, how long has it been since there was a politician who has thought deeply enough about such issues to be worthy of detailed analysis at all? ”
There are at least 3 in the Senate today I can think of off the top of my head: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee.
> he needs an argument to show that trade restrictions would make Americans better off, in some sense broader than economic efficiency
Yes, I think this is exactly what he’s arguing.
> That argument depends on not understanding the relevant economics, not realizing that trade is trade.
This is only true in theory. In practice, there’s a big difference between trade with a country that believes in, say, human rights and free speech, and trade with a country that explicitly wants to eliminate these things.
I think ultimately the disagreement here comes down to, you believe prices accurately model human values to a large degree. Vance rejects this, as do I. Prices don’t reflect the things we hold sacred - like, at what cost you’d sell your kids to someone else. If you say there is no number, you’re saying it’s sacred. Most of what we truly value is sacred. Absent constraints on trade - in particular, absent incentive structures that encourage stable long term investment inside America - I think we should expect things like, more kids being in daycare instead of being raised at home with parents. That looks like value creation through an economic lens, but it comes at the cost of destroying the sacred bond between mother and child, and then replacing this with an economic facsimile.
I agree that “free trade” doesn’t fully characterize American policy over the last few decades. But the moment you agree that no cash amount is sufficient for you to, say, selll your children, you’re agreeing economic models of value are not reflective of what humans truly value, which is Vance’s point.
That isn't enough. I agree that if his maximand isn't economic efficiency I can't prove that he should support free trade, but it requires an actual argument to show that he should be against it. What economic efficiency measures is one thing he considers good, if not the only thing, and he needs an argument to show that tariffs increase other things he considers good enough to balance that. I have seen nothing by him that implies he understands the relevant economics — his arguments for good effects of tariffs seem to depend on the standard misunderstanding.
The correct argument, I think, is go for efficiency above all. For trade policy, that means free trade. Then, tax, with as little deadweight loss as possible, say, with a progressive consumption tax, the winners from this policy and compensate the losers, with as little deadweight loss as possible, such as with a negative income tax.
Sticking with trade for the moment, a movement from restricted trade to free trade means not that there will be no losers, but rather that the winners win more than the losers lose.
Why no politician proposes such may be due to lack of understanding, but also because opacity in politics is welcome. It's not just that the income tax is inefficient compared to a consumption tax, e.g., but the actual income tax code is incomprehensible. Tariffs hide everything!
And tariffs can be defended with the claim that they benefit the country, since few voters understand the relevant economics. My impression is that most people, told that the tariff makes some Americans worse off, will interpret that as being about the other country putting up tariffs in response. It is much easier to intuit trade policy as being like war than as what it actually is.
For an individual (or his family) that has personally witnessed their high paying factory job get outsourced and be unable to find a job that pays more the minimum wage, do you think it's reasonably accurate for that person that protective tariffs would have been a benefit? That is, even after factoring in the increased costs for goods that they will pay, that their own situation is better under tariffs with a local union job than with lower costs but a bad or no job?
In my experience with family and friends who have seen that happen, they would not be concerned about a trade war so much as how they personally are affected.
Overall I disagree with them and support free trade, but I don't have a good answer about specific circumstances. I think the longshore workers benefit from something very much like tariffs, in that their gain is the rest of our losses. They still seem to be getting some pretty significant gains from it!
"in particular, absent incentive structures that encourage stable long term investment inside America"
I am curious how tariffs or other policies Trump and Vance are putting forth accomplish this. I think some of their general deregulation tendencies can help, but I haven't heard anything that specifically addresses it.
First, that's one of the justifications for tariffs, to encourage manufacturing inside the tariff barrier.
Second, America doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough / better than alternatives. That's part of the discussion around lowering business taxes, including that statist proposal that countries vow to keep their business taxes above a certain level, because they hate the idea of competition. It's as doomed as any cartel. Even if every country signed some such treaty, there'd be all sorts of tricks, like exemptions, what qualifies as income, subsidies, deductions from other taxes.
But tariffs don't encourage manufacturing inside the tariff barrier, they simply change what gets made. Marginal spending shifts from what manufacturers and consumers would buy from over seas to what the tariff collecting government spends on. Governments are not known for spending on stable long term investments. Manufacturers that use imported materials (whether raw materials like steel or semi finished goods) have less incentive to invest because their costs of doing business in the US just went up relative to what they were. Consumers might buy less imported goods, or they might not; it entirely depends on the elasticity of demand.
In other words, that justification for tariffs is misguided.
Lowering business taxes is a good idea, though, along with deregulation. Having worked in various manufacturing industries for nigh on 20 years now on the planning and operations side, I can attest there are definitely many ways we make manufacturing in the US much harder than it needs to be, and for no good reason.
"In practice, there’s a big difference between trade with a country that believes in, say, human rights and free speech, and trade with a country that explicitly wants to eliminate these things."
The US has been bandying about sanctions with reckless abandon. They are sold as substitutes for war, to punish those who transgress, but there's so much of this stuff I am getting suspicious that it's just cloaked protection or opium for the masses.
"As a cultural conservative in favor of religion and married couples producing children he might see cultural benefits to immigration from countries more culturally conservative than the US has become."
I'm not sure that such a culture exists. For instance, you could say that Hispanics are "more conservative", whatever that means, but they tend to behave in non conservative ways relative to whites (lower marriage rates, higher crime rates, etc). These trends get worse as they assimilate, not better. More importantly, they tend to support welfare and be more welfare dependent.
As Musk put it in his interview with Tucker, whether these third world immigrants reject woke culture or not, the bottom line is they vote based on economics and the economics they like is the economics of the handout. Mexico just elected some socialist loony.
Maybe you could say Asians, who do get married and behave. But Asians are nearly all secular materialists and once they've been here a generation tend to be fierce progressives. They come from a very communitarian risk averse culture that prizes blind conformity. They have very few children. That isn't the same as western conservatism.
Nowhere could that be on more display than during COVID. Conservatives took the exact opposite stance on COVID than Asians did. Asians leaned even further into COVID insanity than western liberals.
This whole "conservative" label for other cultures doesn't make a lot of sense. Basically, anyone who rejects and aspect of wokeness even if they aren't aware of its existence is labeled "conservative". That does not a conservative make.
I would just refer to these cultures as "different". It's impossible to describe a left/right western lens to them. And the universal fact is that when these people immigrate they tend to assimilate towards western leftists values commensurate with their class (Hispanics/Muslims assimilate to underclass norms, Asians assimilate to woke coastal professional norms).
Outside of Israel, Western culture is still haunted by the shadow of WW1 and WW2, but there are plausible internal (pension collapse, hopefully in smaller countries that the rest of the West can learn from?) and external (inability to protect Taiwan, and subsequent end of unipolar world?) shocks on the horizon that would change this.
I was thinking Far East Asians as well though I agree with you the generational problem. The solution is simply to import enough of them they become the dominant culture, which of course wouldn't be good for America nor what most Americans want cue Hawaii, one of the most conservative states in the Union.
Where most denationalizing and free trade 'trains' went off the rails (including in the UK during Thatcherism) is that the most affected people (closure of coal mines and steel mills etc for example) were deliberately or otherwise forgotten.
Most free trade arguments are correct. I sell wheat to them, they sell cars to us. 'Everyone' gains. However, the most affected people needed intervention by the State (not necessarily directly in employment) but retraining programmes or subsidies initially for new industries to employ them including grants to enable the people to move. Too many communities have been left behind in the US (rust belt) and UK (old coal mining communities) resulting in generational poverty with all of its debilitating consequences.
'We', who know all the answers, can argue that those people affected should have moved to new areas for employment, even if it meant poorly paid jobs. They did in the 1930's from the dust bowl to California etc or old Gold Mining towns when the mines closed in the 1890's to new mines in Australia. The answer partly lies in the community spirit that they don't want to lose by moving away. It is mostly fear of the unknown causing inertia.
Whether what Vance and Trump espouse will bring about the results they wish, remains to be seen. At least it brings hope to some (rightly or wrongly). When you feel that you are the forgotten people and are drowning, any branch in the flooded river is a lifeline.
I somewhat agree, but we differ in that I believe the government should have no role in retraining the displaced workers, because they only make it worse. It all comes back to government, which I am convinced is at the heart of all the problems. There are several ways I can think of for government to make a mess of retraining, but I have no data to back this up.
* Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, and labor laws make it difficult and expensive to change jobs, for both businesses and workers. Tying health care insurance to employers is one simple example.
* Housing costs, both in absolute terms and the costs of moving, make it difficult and expensive to move to where the new jobs are.
* Government subsidies and favoritism corrupt markets.
This last is ignored by too many people. When cronyism corrupts markets, it makes it harder for businesses and workers to make good decisions.
Here's one example which I wouldn't know how to prove. I live in Northern California in the boonies. Forest fires are a big concern. I heard several stories a few years back that when the Public Utilities Commission first told PG&E (power company) to pay top dollar for rooftop solar energy being fed back into the grid, PG&E's budget dried up, and when they asked the PUC to raise their rates so they could pay what the law required, the PUC told them to cut expenses. So they stopped trimming trees near lines. I know they did do that, because there were several years where I didn't see a single PG&E crew. Then came the Camp fire which killed 85 people in Paradise, and the last several years, PG&E has been trimming trees gain. Did the PUC really refuse to raise rates? No idea. But everyone who told me believes it, because as much as PG&E is laughed at for being a mindless bureaucracy, the PUC is a government bureaucracy and much more likely to be the culprit.
I like startups and have been laid off and had companies go bankrupt underneath me. One time after getting laid off, the unemployment office tried to steer me into some retraining program which was old and out of date. That seemed all too typical of every time government has tried to help me.
I believe the problem is that we are so used to government holding our hands that we forget we can do things ourselves. Two examples:
* Traffic signs with generic warnings, such as warning there's a curve ahead (if you can't see that far ahead, slow down!), slippery when wet, and so on. Too many people think if the yellow speed limit says 35, they can always go 35, and they stop looking at the actual road conditions. Stop watching your speedometer and start watching the road!
* I have had arguments about who would build the roads if government didn't. These people refused to believe private roads were ever build, or dams for that matter. Tell them that Air Traffic Control had its beginnings in private airlines in 1929 and the government didn't take it over until 1945; or that radio frequency allocation was privately handled and being treated as property by common law courts when the new networks got the government to take it over so the cronies control it. They absolutely refuse to believe it and blindly accept that there must have been reasons other than cronyism.
I came by my disgust with governments the old-fashioned way: they earned it.
This sounds like something quite close to an anti-libertarian.
Conservative social values are to be encouraged, or perhaps enforced, by government action. If he truly wants to replicate the 1950s, there will be jobs for women and jobs for men, and the latter will outpay the former, as well as owning most managerial and supervisory positions. Less explicitly, there will also be jobs for white people, and lesser jobs for various grades of non-white people. In both cases, there will be a few exceptional individuals able to buck the system - but they'll mostly be elite.
We'll all go to Church - perhaps the (Christian) denomination of our choice, but perhaps only "wholesome" ones, and worship the God who ordained this lifestyle. Maybe even a synagogue, if we live in a liberal area. We'll also send our children to compulsory public schools, which will see that they are exposed to the same great morality. etc. etc. Instead of Critical Theory, we'll have Intelligent Design taught in the schools.
Meanwhile, the federal government will be busy shaping the economy in favour of whatever goals are politically desired - probably a mix of America first and better rewards for non-elites. (Or maybe just white, male non-elites. White females will get their rewards through their husbands; non-whites will get the shitty end of the stick. The 1950s were like that. OTOH, Vance's vision of the 1950s may have only limited relationship to the real thing .) At any rate, at the least a New Deal level of economic involvement on the part of the government. Complete with government run projects to both build infrastructure and employ/reward "deserving" people. (The definition of "deserving" will start out class-based, but I doubt it will stay there.)
He obviously isn't a libertarian, but neither is Harris.
You wildly overstate your case. Nothing in his argument implies that women or non-whites should have fewer jobs or lower pay. He probably does believe that more women should be stay at home mothers, although I am not sure he has ever said so.
I don't think I had any quotes from Vance about returning to the 50's. My description of what he wants was to return to "is an idealized version of America in the fifties, perhaps the sixties." The idealized version would not include most of the features you describe.
I see no evidence that he wants to force everyone to be Christian or Jewish — and that was not the case in the fifties. He is married to a Hindu.
Much depends on his particular specifics, and those of whatever supporters he picks up along the way. I'm rather pessimistic, being somewhat of an unreformed and unrepentant Boomer - aka someone whose early political environment is commonly referred to as "the 60s". I know what we were rebelling against.
Vance's preference for non-elites, and his possible support for the economic advancement of the relatively poor was not part of the 50s consensus, though unions and similar were in better shape at the time than today, and both income and wealth inequality were less than they are today. Supporting the ordinary person against the elites was something we were at least theoretically in favor of, and saw as being against The Establishment.
But the rest of it, and in particular support for "morality" and similar - that was what we opposed.
When libertarianism became noticeable to us, its main selling point was splitting conservative social values (enforced "morality") from conservative economic values, so that 60s rebels coopted by the establishment - to the extent of making good money and hoping for more - didn't have to pick between their two priorities. Lots of Yuppies promptly fell in love. (This included me, many decades ago; my views have matured since then.)
Vance may in fact prefer less extreme conservative moral values than the consensus of the 1950s in the US. Or he may support less extreme values in some areas - presumably where they'd particularly chafe him. But having a Hindu wife proves very little - elites in such a system can often do whatever they want, and his wife can be the exception that proves the rule. She's OK, and has proper moral values, simply because she's his wife. The school system he'd support may still force Hindu children to attend aggressively Christian activities, and turn a blind eye to kids picking on "sinful weirdos" among their peers.
As best I can tell, most of what you conjecture about Vance, while it might be true, is not supported by anything I have read that he wrote or said. I repeat that the reference to the 50's was my comment on Vance not anything he wrote or said, so you cannot deduce from that anything about his views beyond the views I described.
"The exception that proves the rule" as you are using it amounts to claiming that evidence against a proposition is evidence for it, and so contributes to fuzzy thinking. That isn't what the phrase means, at least in its origin, and lots of people use it that way because they want an excuse to ignore evidence against whatever claim they are supporting.
As for "the exception that proves the rule," I've encountered a lot of "present company excepted" among folks who otherwise hate people in job lots, based on categories. There's also a version where a member of a category is tolerated as long as they accept a subordinate position, aware that they exist on sufferance.
Vance may or may not associate Christian identification with his desired morality; I actually have no evidence. But it's pretty easy to find plenty of people who do make that identification with a morality somewhat like the one Vance appears to promote. If those people become his supporters, well, I also see no sign he's either principled on the subject, or likely to care provided his own family's non-conformism is politely ignored.
But I could certainly be wrong.
What's surprising me a lot is that you seem to approve of Vance. Of course, you might be bending over backwards to appear neutral, so as not to alienate his supporters if they do well.
You pushed a button of mine too. Phrases like "moral virtues" and almost any synonymn tend to make me see red. Too many vocal supporters of phrases of this kind have behaved exceedingly badly.
And Vance falling into this category tends to "confirm" a not-yet-demonstrated hypothesis about Vance's character based on one particular well-publicized event. Of course it doesn't really confirm anything - confirmation will take actual behaviour, and frequently takes decades before I'm 100% certain - by which time most people agree with me.
I think Vance is clearly dishonest, but he is also intelligent, which makes him interesting. And it is possible that his motives are benevolent, although by no means certain.
My point was not that having a Hindu wife (and writing very positively about her family) proves he isn't prejudiced against non-Christians, although it is evidence that he isn't. But "the exception proves the rule" used as you used it not only makes no sense, it is a way of pretending that evidence against is evidence for.
Populism is indeed the opposite of libertarianism, no doubt about it.
And yet, even if every “accusation” of Vance both stated and implied here were 100% correct, the policies he advocates are still far more pro-growth, pro-freedom and less authoritarian than the policies of this year’s alternative: the border czar Harris-Biden regime.
Libertarians are often called isolationists for opposing foreign military intervention. But Donald Trump and J D Vance are closer to being true isolationists. To my knowledge, the best example of isolationism is the 1603-1868 Japanese policy of Sakoku, which severely restricted foreign trade and foreign relations and prohibited most foreign nationals from entering Japan--and which was partly motivated by the desire to avoid foreign cultural influences.
I have yet to see a rebuttal to the following argument: you need tariffs to offset the economic costs of your labor and environmental policies, or else the net incentive structure of your policies is “do business elsewhere.” The net incentive structure you want is, “do business here, or somewhere else that has a similar regulatory regime.”
What we export and what we import depend on the relative costs of producing goods in the US, and that isn't changed by the costs you describe. Not the cost of producing cars in the US vs producing cars in China but the cost of producing cars in the US vs producing wheat in the US, those costs being in the same units. Comparing that ratio to the same ratio in China determines whether we import cars or wheat.
The economics of trade is really not something you can invent for yourself and expect to get right.
How would you like it if some other country banned US imports because they thought our laws and regulations were too stringent?
EU countries mostly mandate more vacation, government health care, and so on, than US countries, or so I have heard. How would you like it if they banned US imports?
Country A has free health care but only allows 1 week of vacation a year. Country B has private health care but mandates a month of vacation a year. Do they bothban each other's imports?
I think his point is that by mandating more vacation, Europe is essentially banning exports and/or mandating imports. These policies make their products more expensive and therefore uncompetitive with foreign options. If Europe wants to maintain productive industries (or anything competitive) then it would need to balance the costs of their own regulations against foreign competitors selling for cheaper for lack of that regulation.
I'm generally in favor of not mandating the vacation (let the workers and owners negotiate) and also not putting in tariffs. Let the chips fall where they may, to general benefit. But if you're going to mandate the vacation (and environmental protection, and whatever), you've already burdened your local employment. Putting your thumb on the scale against your own people.
I think this is especially important in regards to something like CO2 production. Whatever you think about the climate implications, if the West is requiring expensive alternatives and China isn't, then China gets a huge competitive advantage while also still producing massive amounts of CO2. That's hurting the West no matter what you think about climate change.
If people in some other country don't agree with other countries' laws and regulations, are they somehow less entitled to work? If you don't want to buy the fruit of their labor, don't; but you have no right to prevent me from buying it.
Have you ever thought about how immoral the very concept of modern unions is? Striking workers have quit their jobs, and he government forbids their former employer from hiring replacements. And unions can be monopolies, but not employers.
Forget closed shop states. Government has already stacked the deck, twice, in unions' favor. How is that fair or moral?
If you want to pay higher prices, go ahead, no one's stopping you. Don't make me pay tariffs because you have a guilty conscience. You remind me of billionaires who want the government to raise taxes; hey, rich jerk, the IRS would be delighted if you just sent them some extra. Why do you think I should have to pay also to assuage your guilt conscience?
No. Government should just butt out. It's none of their business.
Another possibility for the results of a trade imbalance is that American money comes back as debt. We borrow our money back from China, potentially to purchase more goods from China. Long term, that makes us beholden to the Chinese economy both for the physical goods that they produce and then also for the debt we use to finance our lifestyles. In the short term this is obviously to our huge advantage - we consume all the goods without having to produce them. That's very short term thinking though, as eventually we have nothing to trade and China is controlling all of our debt. This lets them purchase our land, businesses, whatever has long term value in exchange for the debt we've taken on. I guess we could default, which gives us some leverage over the Chinese. This doesn't feel like it's sustainable or desirable to me, though.
Another thought - the US economy as a whole isn't all that we care about. For instance, if one person controlled all of a $100 trillion economy, and the remainder of the citizens were slaves, we wouldn't consider this positive even though that's a huge economy compared to now. If I understand Vance correctly, he's looking at a US economy that's much larger than it used to be, but that the benefits of the economy are poorly distributed. More specifically, people without a college degree are receiving far less from this economy compared to those with more education and in certain fields. It's a great time to be in Tech still, but a bad time to be a farmer, machinist, or fork lift driver. Given that most people even in the US do not have college degrees, it appears that our current economy is not as beneficial for the majority of our citizens. We're somewhere along the road to that one person having all scenario. If we agree that one person owning it all is bad, then there's got to be an inflection point where few enough people benefit that we no longer consider the economy good, even if it's growing.
I've been very supportive of a free market in my lifetime, because I see the benefits of open trade in a "raising all boats" kind of way. If that's changed (and I'm not saying it has), then that would be a reason to reevaluate.
Vance seems to be saying that it's changed, that we've reached or are heading towards a bad result. If he's accurate about that, then "overall" numbers aren't answering the question. Or to put it more simply but less accurately - if the Finance sector and Tech sector are both growing massively while all the other sectors are dying, and less people work in Finance and Tech, then there's a problem even if the US as a country seems to be doing very well.
That's beside the point about whether the US has the industrial capacity to win a war. If we're beholden to Chinese industry for our war materials, then that gives them a geopolitical advantage over us as well. How much that's true is difficult to assess. Unfortunately, that's the kind of problem that gets worse with time (if, say, all the competent machinists retire) and is harder to fix.
The relevant borrowing is, I suspect, mostly by government, to finance the budget deficit, although I don't have any data. If they balanced the budget the trade deficit would drop sharply. Given the existence of the budget deficit, the alternative to having it financed by foreigners is having it financed by Americans at a somewhat higher interest rate, with capital those Americans could instead have invested in American firms.
I mentioned the argument about distribution in my first Vance post, where I wrote:
" If a tariff on auto imports makes midwestern auto workers richer and west coast programmers poorer that may, from Vance’s standpoint, be a net gain — Silicon Valley programmers are not the people he cares about."
That's obviously possible, but I haven't seen Vance, or anyone else, actually make that argument and support it with evidence that the people trade benefits are substantially richer than the people it harms. As I pointed out in the same post, agriculture is also an export industry.
Another possibility is that Vance rejects the assumption that individual consumers correctly evaluate their own interests. There is at least one place where he implies that reducing consumption of good imported from China isn't a bad thing because the goods in question are not worth buying. That fits with the implication in his book that his people are not making economically rational decisions, are blowing money on expensive XMas presents to prove to others that they are not really poor.
Assuming it is true that incomes are becoming more unequal, why would you think that free trade is the reason? I can think of more plausible alternatives.
I think free trade that's enabled by government borrowing is *a* problem. I don't think it's a singular *the* problem. Big picture, the government spends a lot of money on direct and indirect redistribution. Social programs, welfare, contracts to companies to provide services of dubious worth/need. If a poor family in WV buys Chinese junk from Walmart that's subsidized by welfare payments from the government that is in turn borrowed from the Chinese - that's an unsustainable cycle that hurts the poor family in several ways. We can blame them for individual choices made, but no one thinks they would be rich without buying that Xbox.
The economy is too complex for us to determine exactly who benefits and who is harmed by free trade. I think we can determine a few heuristics though - someone without a job is at least not served by the economy. Someone making significantly more than median is. So on some level it's true that SV programmers are winning from [the overall free trade economy] while WV coal miners are not.
By this measure I personally am benefitted by free trade - I make above median and have a home/car/family. I know an awful lot of people who are not benefitted using this kind of broad measure. It's easy for me to appreciate free trade and think it's very beneficial. That said, I am openminded to the possibility that I'm wrong on the aggregate, and that there may be a better system (or hybrid, or adjustments) that would benefit more people. I struggle with what that would look like, because ultimately I agree with you that tariffs will cost more than the benefit they produce. Other interventions feel the same. It's easy for me to say "reduce regulations" but ultimately I don't think even a completely unregulated manufacturing sector can outcompete Chinese prices. Costs in the US are higher because we are overall richer, so even if there were no added costs the Chinese labor is still cheaper enough for them to outcompete our labor on most things. Retraining seems to me mostly to be a sham - older workers will struggle to learn entirely new skills, and not everyone is well equipped for the types of work we have available. I'm not sure what else is available, so I find myself sympathetic to those who want protectionism.
" but ultimately I don't think even a completely unregulated manufacturing sector can outcompete Chinese prices."
Chinese prices are in Yuan, American prices in dollars. Until you have a theory of what determines the exchange rate between them, what I just quoted from you is meaningless, like saying you don't think your height will ever be more than your weight.
You are thinking in terms of 18th century economics, when almost everyone was on a gold standard so you could compare prices across countries and trade adjusted by flows of gold changing domestic prices instead of by exchange rates.
Instead of repeating my explanation of the economics of trade I will point you at the post that has it:
"There is a sense in which trade always balances; if an American sells a dollar for Chinese Yuan to buy Chinese goods..." --
US companies are not constrained by a lack of investment, so to the extent that the CCPs mercantilism forces the US to either engage in borrowing or suffer unemployment, it probably drives US government deficits. The social negatives to long term unemployment, even with generous public assistance transfers, are quite large. It also doesn't feel especially libertarian.
My feeling is with the way the world currently operates, the choice isn't between free trade and protectionism, but a choice between an active industrial policy that aims to enforce comparative advantage (like Bancor, Import certificates, capital controls) or a passive industrial policy that amounts to the culmination of all other governments choices and the various distortions those cause. (Strong dollar, trade deficits, unnaturally weak industry, etc.)
I don't understand why you think "the CCPs mercantilism forces the US to either engage in borrowing or suffer unemployment." It isn't that China somehow (how?) forces us to import more than we export and we then have to borrow from them. The fact that we are borrowing is the reason imports are more than exports. The US ran a trade deficit for much of the 19th century because we were building canals and railroads with European money.
Not asking you to read it in its entirety, but there's a table at the bottom of the second article that sort of explains my logic. CLT+F "Different Impacts"
My assumption for the US today corresponds to: "The U.S. capital account is driven mainly by the independent decision of foreign investors to invest excess global savings." and "Desired investment is broadly in line with actual investment"
But in the 19th century the assumption was probably that "The U.S. capital account is driven by trade, and mainly reflects the need to finance the deficit." and "Desired investment exceeds actual investment"
A lower fiscal deficit might increase business confidence, increasing actual investment opportunities in the US, but it might also increase the desire of foreigners to lend to the US (well in excess of investment needs).
To finance what deficit? Europeans were lending money to American rail and canal companies to build railroads and dig canals. I don't know if the federal government was running a deficit, but total government spending, federal, state, and local, was about 10% of GNP and the federal was the smallest of the three, so federal spending wasn't a significant part of the economy.
Sorry : "The U.S. capital account is driven by trade, and mainly reflects the need to finance the (trade) deficit" -- i.e. lending to a developing country because said country has a lot of investment opportunities relative to domestic savings.
Although many people critical of these movements like comparing European right-wing populists to Trump, I don't think this usually makes much sense, and these European parties aren't even very similar to each other, other than favouring a more restrictive immigration policy. E.g. Norway's Fremskrittspartiet was founded as an anti-tax party and still is considered a liberal (not in the US sense) party, whereas Sweden's Sverigedemokraterna was founded as a nationalist party, considers itself a conservative party and isn't too concerned with reducing the size of the government other than when it comes to spending less money on immigrants. I'm not aware of trade policy being a hot issue in any European country.
BRUSSELS (AP) [July 8, 2024] — Far-right parties from 12 countries, including France’s National Rally and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, announced on Monday that they have joined together to form a new bloc in the European Parliament and plan to become a major political force.
Thanks for the examples of right wing parties. I'm working on a post on the European New Right, trying to figure out what they have in common with each other or what Vance wants. Several of the ones mentioned above were ones I missed.
I believe National Rally and Brothers of Italy are both protectionist at present, although not necessarily throughout their history. So far the common elements among the European New Right parties seem to be opposition to immigration, at least from poor countries, opposition to Islam, and Euroskepticism.
ECR is another bloc in the EU Parliament of about the same size which is also labelled right-wing populist, and ESN is a smaller one. There appear to be strong incentives for parties to join blocs.
“ Whatever you might think of these policies, evidence slowly accumulated that they failed to address a very real social crisis among the Republican base. ”
You cited this quote to claim Vance was dissing and disavowing Milton Friedman and his policies. But quite apart from the fact that he was being a politician (even though he hadn’t announced any campaign back then), all he said was that the policies failed to address this other thing - a “social crisis”.
He didn’t disavow such MF economic policies. All he said was that said policies were insufficient.
Which frankly the rest of your piece articulates well.
Yes, I confess that someone explicitly not making economic growth prime (over anything save national security) is not optimal for those of us with classical liberal values.
But that’s very different from saying that he is actively hostile to pro-growth policies.
P.S. by contrast, I agree with you 100% on your characterization of Trump’s views (“ That suggests that Vance should want less low and medium skill immigration, more high skill, fewer factory workers and more physicians. Trump seems inclined in that direction.”). Admittedly we have a lot more data on Trump than on Vance. But your commentary, while interesting, seems a lot more appropriate for the 2027 GOP primary season than the one we are in now.
Classical liberalism doesn't imply that economic growth is the highest value but that human welfare is. Economic growth is likely to increase human welfare, but it doesn't have to, since there are costs as well as benefits. Consider an illiberal policy of high taxes used to finance investment.
The American Mind piece you shared the link for imo made your case about Vance’s problematic economics views much more strongly than what you included in this piece.
If I run a negative credit card balance every month I will be more and more in debt to the credit card company. That's fun while I'm spending but less fun while I'm paying.
If I stop paying they could at some point decide to repossess everything I own. This is even more explicit if I was selling the assets to fund ongoing consumption.
I guess I could just default and stick them with the bill, or the nation could nationalize assets that foreigners own or decide not to pay interest on securities they own. Fun for us, not fun for the Chinese people that saved and saved and then got stiffed.
And honestly probably not fun for us either if it came to a point.
Now, if you think all the money China lent us was invested into things that will generate returns to pay them back, then I guess all is well. If you're skeptical of that, then we ran up a huge credit card bill and someone (us, them, or both) are going to get stuck with it.
I would have preferred a more sustainable pattern of specialization and trade that wasn't so reliant on giant IOUs from poor Chinese to rich Americans mediated by a authoritarian government with an artificial currency peg.
“ I would have preferred a more sustainable pattern of specialization and trade that wasn't so reliant on giant IOUs from poor Chinese to rich Americans mediated by an authoritarian government with an artificial currency peg.”
Sorry, you are conflating the very real problem of America having too much debt - where I agree with you - with the wrong-notioned mercantilist idea of balanced trade.
At least if it is the welfare of U.S. citizens, rather than Chinese ones, that you are concerned about.
It does indeed help the U.S., in multiple ways, that China has so many dollar-denominated assets.
AFAIK, we have had persistent trade deficits for decades with Germany, France and even the U.K. Are such deficits problematic for the American citizenry in ANY material way?
There are several valid reasons to “go after” China via tariffs - human rights, use of slave labor, national security, intellectual property theft, hell, even the often-vague “unfair trade practices that limit our access to certain of their markets” (pretty sure DF would agree with me on all of these save the last one) - but our trade balance with China and how many dollar-denominated assets the Chinese hold is NOT one of them.
Let me start by promising that I am not an economist and David Friedman may eat my lunch with this comment :-)
There is no such thing as a trade deficit. With fiat money, dollars out HAVE TO equal dollars in. No foreigner is going to accept dollars as payment for our imports unless they can use those dollars to buy American goods, or buy other goods from other foreigners who will in turn buy American goods.
Further to that is the "well known" (to me) comparison to individual people. My employer has a ginormous trade deficit with all its employees. I have an enormous trade deficit with every store I shop at. And yet, somehow I have no trade deficit! That's exactly analogous to the US having a trade deficit with China or any other individual country. It is utterly meaningless.
Then there;s the fact of leaving out of the trade deficit the investments made in America by foreigners. Suppose foreigners earn $1T a month in dollars from their exports / our imports. They buy $900B of American exports and use the remaining $100B to buy businesses, golf courses, hotels, and Disney sweaters, plus pay salaries of their American employees and office space for them. And yet dishonest people call that a deficit.
It's all nonsense. Dollars out equal dollars in, unless those wily furriners have discovered they can get more heat from a pound of currency than a pound of coal, or they like wallpapering their house in dollar bills.
Dollars can be spent buying TBills or shares of stock and keeping them in the US, so although dollars sold equal dollars bought, imports don't have to equal exports. A trade deficit is a capital inflow.
I included Tbills and shares in what foreigners buy, and meant that dollars in and out have to match including that. I apologize for not being clear, and thank you for not eating my lunch ....
My understanding is that it is more common for high-skill Americans to prefer high-skill over low-skill immigration than the reverse. I am in this boat, because a large majority of my life is spent interacting with what Garett Jones calls the O-ring sector.
In particular, the public school system is effectively in the O-ring sector, and a large majority of the upper middle class still uses it. A significant increase in the local low-skill population will drive the probability of my kids receiving a similar-or-better-quality public school education as I received down to ~zero. In my calculus, the economic complementarity discussed in this post is barely even at the level of a rounding error in comparison to this consideration.
“ My understanding is that it is more common for high-skill Americans to prefer high-skill over low-skill immigration than the reverse. ”
Your understanding may well have been correct even 15 years ago, but it demonstrably is not the case now.
Democrats are the party of college-“educated”, high-skill citizens and also the party of deliberate, explicit support for mass illegal immigration of overwhelmingly low-skill immigrants.
To the extent that this policy is not actually thought highly of by the majority of Democrat voters, it is disproportionately the highly educated Dem voters who support the policy.
If your point is that high-skill Democrats are ALSO open to more high- skill immigration, I won’t deny that.
But my point is that they are the ones disproportionately supporting the Dems *current* position on immigration - allowing millions of overwhelmingly low-skill immigrants into the country, knowing full well most will not show up for their hearings scheduled for months later.
I think I saw some stats on this once - maybe check Rob Henderson? - but I don’t know and cannot be sure.
I will tell you anecdotally most of my liberal friends have been in support of the border czar Harris-Biden’s policy. And you surely don’t deny that a) lower-income Dems and b) blacks do *not* support the policy as much (if net at all), correct?
Given that SOMEONE still supports the Harris-Biden border policies, if it ain’t lower income, and it ain’t blacks, who do you think it is?!? Hispanics are actually kinda split on this - which is a large part of why Trump’s numbers among Hispanics have gone up so much over the last 8 years.
In 2021, about 63% of Democrats supported Biden's handling of immigration.
By late 2022, this had fallen to around 51%.
Recent polling in 2024 shows approval is now in the range of 43-45%
Now if you have numbers that say that show that high-skill (college educated) Democrats do NOT support the border czar Harris-Biden border policies of the last 3.7 years, I’d love to see them.
But since highly educated is the best proxy we have for high skill, its is now a fact that close to 2/3rds of those people vote Democrat.
You and I (perhaps I should speak only for myself, idk) are in a shrinking minority…
If your *only* point is that a majority of “high skill Americans” favor more high skill immigration, then yes that’s likely to be true.
But in the context of this piece, which was talking about all immigration, and primarily about low-skill immigration from illegal immigrants, the fact remains that it is the highest skilled Democrat voters who *most* favor the current policy of bringing in millions of low-skill illegal immigrants.
And in practice given the politics of the country, there is close to zero chance we will get more high skill immigration while one party insists on bringing in millions of low-skill illegal immigrants. As should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
And the party that wants - and has been implementing that policy full throttle for the last 3.5+ years - is the party of the highly-skilled. Or as Richard Hanania calls it, “Elite Human Capital”.
So whether intentional or not, it is high-skill Americans who are disproportionately responsible for the fact that we don’t have more high-skill immigration.
Canada is the foreign country most culturally similar to the US, and Australia and New Zealand are not far behind. Liberal parties in all three have had no problem favoring high-skill immigration over low[1]; the US is actually the odd country out among the Anglosphere settler colonies.
This doesn't mean that Brazilification of the US is impossible, but it's far from preordained at this time. Especially because China is presenting a genuine challenge to American power, has leadership that doesn't even have qualms about restricting internal migration of low-skill *natives*[2], and much of the American upper middle class stands to lose big if China does manage to end American dominance. The Democrats may want to cut things as close as possible, but they don't want to actually lose Taiwan.
1: Yes, the Canadian implementation is somewhat corrupted right now, but the current liberal leadership is expected to face heavy electoral punishment for their role in this. I expect the Canadian public school system will remain at a quality level that I'd consider acceptable for my own kids.
2: I don't endorse China's hukou system; my point is that we don't have a totally uncontrolled experiment.
My ex wife thinks so. Many middle aged women seem smitten with his piercing color enhancing contact blue eyes, full head of hair, facial hair, and eyeliner. Sans the eyeliner, I'm told he looks like a feminized lumberjack. Plus he's young enough, rich enough, and not morbidly obesee.
Insightful, as always. I don't think the Trump plus Vance phenomenon is that hard to understand, nor is it unique to the US by any means. Neither Trump nor Vance made the New Right. [Yes, the lights are going on all over Europe, too.] The New Right made Trump, and he presciently chose Vance. [The New Right also made Georgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and, yes Alice Weidel. I'm not mentioning many others.]
The New Right are the new forgotten men, and their wives and children. No, they are nowhere anything near classical liberals, no one is really, [though strangely the AfD was founded by such]. The New Right has learned that the State giveth and the State taketh away. The New Right everywhere has found that the State giveth to some and taketh from them.
The established political parties have reacted the same way everywhere: Demonize the New Right. Presumably because that's all they have as an argument. Ignore the political problem. I've always been amused when a left party condemns populism. What is really meant is that populists should be left wing because populism is left wing!
Reminds me of a poem by Bert Brecht, himself a commie:
Would it not in that case be simpler
for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
--Bert Brecht, The Solution, 1953. Published 1959.
Apologies, I've been seething at this stuff at an increasing intensity for some years.
I don't have much use for government, period, but if anything would push me to vote for Trump or other "far right" candidates, it's the way the media demonize them as "far right", "neo nazi", "fascist", "literally Hitler". Just as with climate catastrophe, wokism, and the rest, when all they do is spout rhetoric and lies, I begin to suspect the truth must be elsewhere.
Funny, I thought of that quote myself when reading David's post. If the US elites could simply replace the current population with one more fitting their goals (I assume a mixture of a small but extremely competent elite who are experts and then a large enough underclass to maintain society) I suspect that they would. The middle class doesn't seem to be of much use to them, and our lower classes are unruly and unskilled. Better to replace them with 3rd world poor or the world's general elite. Such a society would likely be extremely rich, but I find myself unable to sign on even if I would be among the wealthy.
Depressing.
If it were possible to elect a President who would work for free trade and small government, he would have my vote like a shot. But 90% or more of America doesn’t want that, so we are left asking which party comes closest. To me that seems clear.
That's exactly how I think. I submitted my mail-in ballot for Trump/Vance a few weeks ago. My emotions are much more along the lines of what David posted a short while ago: The Democrats, well, the Left, are my Out group. Trump/Vance are my Far group. When they do well, I feel good. An In group I hardly have. Well, there are those seven classical liberals hiding out in the suburbs of DC, where I live. I don't even have their fax numbers!
I think your analysis is reasonable. All I can think is, how long has it been since there was a politician who has thought deeply enough about such issues to be worthy of detailed analysis at all? Even if Vance is getting some of this stuff wrong, he is obviously intelligent and giving these matters consideration. If you sat with him, I think he would have responses to you and might even change his mind at the margins. Now think of Harris/Walz. No comparison.
That was my impression of Newt Gingrich. I somehow got on a mailing list for cassette tapes of talks he gave and concluded that he would be a fun person to have sitting next to me on a long flight.
Of the four candidates I expect Vance would be the most interesting to talk with.
I vaguely recall he was hauled before some House Committee for earning a bit on the side, including for making those tapes. Even his political opponents thought the tapes were very good! Those were the days.
I can't say much about Gingrich* but I remember Dan Carlin (I think in episode 150) made that comment as well as in regardless of one's opinion of Newt's politics, he was effective, a thinker, and both highly articulate and never a bore to speak with.
* I never liked his politics
“All I can think is, how long has it been since there was a politician who has thought deeply enough about such issues to be worthy of detailed analysis at all? ”
There are at least 3 in the Senate today I can think of off the top of my head: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee.
Agreed. My focus was too narrowly on presidential candidates.
> he needs an argument to show that trade restrictions would make Americans better off, in some sense broader than economic efficiency
Yes, I think this is exactly what he’s arguing.
> That argument depends on not understanding the relevant economics, not realizing that trade is trade.
This is only true in theory. In practice, there’s a big difference between trade with a country that believes in, say, human rights and free speech, and trade with a country that explicitly wants to eliminate these things.
I think ultimately the disagreement here comes down to, you believe prices accurately model human values to a large degree. Vance rejects this, as do I. Prices don’t reflect the things we hold sacred - like, at what cost you’d sell your kids to someone else. If you say there is no number, you’re saying it’s sacred. Most of what we truly value is sacred. Absent constraints on trade - in particular, absent incentive structures that encourage stable long term investment inside America - I think we should expect things like, more kids being in daycare instead of being raised at home with parents. That looks like value creation through an economic lens, but it comes at the cost of destroying the sacred bond between mother and child, and then replacing this with an economic facsimile.
I agree that “free trade” doesn’t fully characterize American policy over the last few decades. But the moment you agree that no cash amount is sufficient for you to, say, selll your children, you’re agreeing economic models of value are not reflective of what humans truly value, which is Vance’s point.
That isn't enough. I agree that if his maximand isn't economic efficiency I can't prove that he should support free trade, but it requires an actual argument to show that he should be against it. What economic efficiency measures is one thing he considers good, if not the only thing, and he needs an argument to show that tariffs increase other things he considers good enough to balance that. I have seen nothing by him that implies he understands the relevant economics — his arguments for good effects of tariffs seem to depend on the standard misunderstanding.
The correct argument, I think, is go for efficiency above all. For trade policy, that means free trade. Then, tax, with as little deadweight loss as possible, say, with a progressive consumption tax, the winners from this policy and compensate the losers, with as little deadweight loss as possible, such as with a negative income tax.
Sticking with trade for the moment, a movement from restricted trade to free trade means not that there will be no losers, but rather that the winners win more than the losers lose.
Why no politician proposes such may be due to lack of understanding, but also because opacity in politics is welcome. It's not just that the income tax is inefficient compared to a consumption tax, e.g., but the actual income tax code is incomprehensible. Tariffs hide everything!
And tariffs can be defended with the claim that they benefit the country, since few voters understand the relevant economics. My impression is that most people, told that the tariff makes some Americans worse off, will interpret that as being about the other country putting up tariffs in response. It is much easier to intuit trade policy as being like war than as what it actually is.
For an individual (or his family) that has personally witnessed their high paying factory job get outsourced and be unable to find a job that pays more the minimum wage, do you think it's reasonably accurate for that person that protective tariffs would have been a benefit? That is, even after factoring in the increased costs for goods that they will pay, that their own situation is better under tariffs with a local union job than with lower costs but a bad or no job?
In my experience with family and friends who have seen that happen, they would not be concerned about a trade war so much as how they personally are affected.
Overall I disagree with them and support free trade, but I don't have a good answer about specific circumstances. I think the longshore workers benefit from something very much like tariffs, in that their gain is the rest of our losses. They still seem to be getting some pretty significant gains from it!
Of course tariffs benefit some people — that is why firms lobby to get them.
"in particular, absent incentive structures that encourage stable long term investment inside America"
I am curious how tariffs or other policies Trump and Vance are putting forth accomplish this. I think some of their general deregulation tendencies can help, but I haven't heard anything that specifically addresses it.
First, that's one of the justifications for tariffs, to encourage manufacturing inside the tariff barrier.
Second, America doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough / better than alternatives. That's part of the discussion around lowering business taxes, including that statist proposal that countries vow to keep their business taxes above a certain level, because they hate the idea of competition. It's as doomed as any cartel. Even if every country signed some such treaty, there'd be all sorts of tricks, like exemptions, what qualifies as income, subsidies, deductions from other taxes.
But tariffs don't encourage manufacturing inside the tariff barrier, they simply change what gets made. Marginal spending shifts from what manufacturers and consumers would buy from over seas to what the tariff collecting government spends on. Governments are not known for spending on stable long term investments. Manufacturers that use imported materials (whether raw materials like steel or semi finished goods) have less incentive to invest because their costs of doing business in the US just went up relative to what they were. Consumers might buy less imported goods, or they might not; it entirely depends on the elasticity of demand.
In other words, that justification for tariffs is misguided.
Lowering business taxes is a good idea, though, along with deregulation. Having worked in various manufacturing industries for nigh on 20 years now on the planning and operations side, I can attest there are definitely many ways we make manufacturing in the US much harder than it needs to be, and for no good reason.
"In practice, there’s a big difference between trade with a country that believes in, say, human rights and free speech, and trade with a country that explicitly wants to eliminate these things."
The US has been bandying about sanctions with reckless abandon. They are sold as substitutes for war, to punish those who transgress, but there's so much of this stuff I am getting suspicious that it's just cloaked protection or opium for the masses.
"As a cultural conservative in favor of religion and married couples producing children he might see cultural benefits to immigration from countries more culturally conservative than the US has become."
I'm not sure that such a culture exists. For instance, you could say that Hispanics are "more conservative", whatever that means, but they tend to behave in non conservative ways relative to whites (lower marriage rates, higher crime rates, etc). These trends get worse as they assimilate, not better. More importantly, they tend to support welfare and be more welfare dependent.
As Musk put it in his interview with Tucker, whether these third world immigrants reject woke culture or not, the bottom line is they vote based on economics and the economics they like is the economics of the handout. Mexico just elected some socialist loony.
Maybe you could say Asians, who do get married and behave. But Asians are nearly all secular materialists and once they've been here a generation tend to be fierce progressives. They come from a very communitarian risk averse culture that prizes blind conformity. They have very few children. That isn't the same as western conservatism.
Nowhere could that be on more display than during COVID. Conservatives took the exact opposite stance on COVID than Asians did. Asians leaned even further into COVID insanity than western liberals.
This whole "conservative" label for other cultures doesn't make a lot of sense. Basically, anyone who rejects and aspect of wokeness even if they aren't aware of its existence is labeled "conservative". That does not a conservative make.
I would just refer to these cultures as "different". It's impossible to describe a left/right western lens to them. And the universal fact is that when these people immigrate they tend to assimilate towards western leftists values commensurate with their class (Hispanics/Muslims assimilate to underclass norms, Asians assimilate to woke coastal professional norms).
There is Israel.
Outside of Israel, Western culture is still haunted by the shadow of WW1 and WW2, but there are plausible internal (pension collapse, hopefully in smaller countries that the rest of the West can learn from?) and external (inability to protect Taiwan, and subsequent end of unipolar world?) shocks on the horizon that would change this.
I was thinking Far East Asians as well though I agree with you the generational problem. The solution is simply to import enough of them they become the dominant culture, which of course wouldn't be good for America nor what most Americans want cue Hawaii, one of the most conservative states in the Union.
Where most denationalizing and free trade 'trains' went off the rails (including in the UK during Thatcherism) is that the most affected people (closure of coal mines and steel mills etc for example) were deliberately or otherwise forgotten.
Most free trade arguments are correct. I sell wheat to them, they sell cars to us. 'Everyone' gains. However, the most affected people needed intervention by the State (not necessarily directly in employment) but retraining programmes or subsidies initially for new industries to employ them including grants to enable the people to move. Too many communities have been left behind in the US (rust belt) and UK (old coal mining communities) resulting in generational poverty with all of its debilitating consequences.
'We', who know all the answers, can argue that those people affected should have moved to new areas for employment, even if it meant poorly paid jobs. They did in the 1930's from the dust bowl to California etc or old Gold Mining towns when the mines closed in the 1890's to new mines in Australia. The answer partly lies in the community spirit that they don't want to lose by moving away. It is mostly fear of the unknown causing inertia.
Whether what Vance and Trump espouse will bring about the results they wish, remains to be seen. At least it brings hope to some (rightly or wrongly). When you feel that you are the forgotten people and are drowning, any branch in the flooded river is a lifeline.
I somewhat agree, but we differ in that I believe the government should have no role in retraining the displaced workers, because they only make it worse. It all comes back to government, which I am convinced is at the heart of all the problems. There are several ways I can think of for government to make a mess of retraining, but I have no data to back this up.
* Minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, and labor laws make it difficult and expensive to change jobs, for both businesses and workers. Tying health care insurance to employers is one simple example.
* Housing costs, both in absolute terms and the costs of moving, make it difficult and expensive to move to where the new jobs are.
* Government subsidies and favoritism corrupt markets.
This last is ignored by too many people. When cronyism corrupts markets, it makes it harder for businesses and workers to make good decisions.
Here's one example which I wouldn't know how to prove. I live in Northern California in the boonies. Forest fires are a big concern. I heard several stories a few years back that when the Public Utilities Commission first told PG&E (power company) to pay top dollar for rooftop solar energy being fed back into the grid, PG&E's budget dried up, and when they asked the PUC to raise their rates so they could pay what the law required, the PUC told them to cut expenses. So they stopped trimming trees near lines. I know they did do that, because there were several years where I didn't see a single PG&E crew. Then came the Camp fire which killed 85 people in Paradise, and the last several years, PG&E has been trimming trees gain. Did the PUC really refuse to raise rates? No idea. But everyone who told me believes it, because as much as PG&E is laughed at for being a mindless bureaucracy, the PUC is a government bureaucracy and much more likely to be the culprit.
I like startups and have been laid off and had companies go bankrupt underneath me. One time after getting laid off, the unemployment office tried to steer me into some retraining program which was old and out of date. That seemed all too typical of every time government has tried to help me.
I believe the problem is that we are so used to government holding our hands that we forget we can do things ourselves. Two examples:
* Traffic signs with generic warnings, such as warning there's a curve ahead (if you can't see that far ahead, slow down!), slippery when wet, and so on. Too many people think if the yellow speed limit says 35, they can always go 35, and they stop looking at the actual road conditions. Stop watching your speedometer and start watching the road!
* I have had arguments about who would build the roads if government didn't. These people refused to believe private roads were ever build, or dams for that matter. Tell them that Air Traffic Control had its beginnings in private airlines in 1929 and the government didn't take it over until 1945; or that radio frequency allocation was privately handled and being treated as property by common law courts when the new networks got the government to take it over so the cronies control it. They absolutely refuse to believe it and blindly accept that there must have been reasons other than cronyism.
I came by my disgust with governments the old-fashioned way: they earned it.
This sounds like something quite close to an anti-libertarian.
Conservative social values are to be encouraged, or perhaps enforced, by government action. If he truly wants to replicate the 1950s, there will be jobs for women and jobs for men, and the latter will outpay the former, as well as owning most managerial and supervisory positions. Less explicitly, there will also be jobs for white people, and lesser jobs for various grades of non-white people. In both cases, there will be a few exceptional individuals able to buck the system - but they'll mostly be elite.
We'll all go to Church - perhaps the (Christian) denomination of our choice, but perhaps only "wholesome" ones, and worship the God who ordained this lifestyle. Maybe even a synagogue, if we live in a liberal area. We'll also send our children to compulsory public schools, which will see that they are exposed to the same great morality. etc. etc. Instead of Critical Theory, we'll have Intelligent Design taught in the schools.
Meanwhile, the federal government will be busy shaping the economy in favour of whatever goals are politically desired - probably a mix of America first and better rewards for non-elites. (Or maybe just white, male non-elites. White females will get their rewards through their husbands; non-whites will get the shitty end of the stick. The 1950s were like that. OTOH, Vance's vision of the 1950s may have only limited relationship to the real thing .) At any rate, at the least a New Deal level of economic involvement on the part of the government. Complete with government run projects to both build infrastructure and employ/reward "deserving" people. (The definition of "deserving" will start out class-based, but I doubt it will stay there.)
If I were a libertarian, I'd be appalled.
He obviously isn't a libertarian, but neither is Harris.
You wildly overstate your case. Nothing in his argument implies that women or non-whites should have fewer jobs or lower pay. He probably does believe that more women should be stay at home mothers, although I am not sure he has ever said so.
I don't think I had any quotes from Vance about returning to the 50's. My description of what he wants was to return to "is an idealized version of America in the fifties, perhaps the sixties." The idealized version would not include most of the features you describe.
I see no evidence that he wants to force everyone to be Christian or Jewish — and that was not the case in the fifties. He is married to a Hindu.
Much depends on his particular specifics, and those of whatever supporters he picks up along the way. I'm rather pessimistic, being somewhat of an unreformed and unrepentant Boomer - aka someone whose early political environment is commonly referred to as "the 60s". I know what we were rebelling against.
Vance's preference for non-elites, and his possible support for the economic advancement of the relatively poor was not part of the 50s consensus, though unions and similar were in better shape at the time than today, and both income and wealth inequality were less than they are today. Supporting the ordinary person against the elites was something we were at least theoretically in favor of, and saw as being against The Establishment.
But the rest of it, and in particular support for "morality" and similar - that was what we opposed.
When libertarianism became noticeable to us, its main selling point was splitting conservative social values (enforced "morality") from conservative economic values, so that 60s rebels coopted by the establishment - to the extent of making good money and hoping for more - didn't have to pick between their two priorities. Lots of Yuppies promptly fell in love. (This included me, many decades ago; my views have matured since then.)
Vance may in fact prefer less extreme conservative moral values than the consensus of the 1950s in the US. Or he may support less extreme values in some areas - presumably where they'd particularly chafe him. But having a Hindu wife proves very little - elites in such a system can often do whatever they want, and his wife can be the exception that proves the rule. She's OK, and has proper moral values, simply because she's his wife. The school system he'd support may still force Hindu children to attend aggressively Christian activities, and turn a blind eye to kids picking on "sinful weirdos" among their peers.
As best I can tell, most of what you conjecture about Vance, while it might be true, is not supported by anything I have read that he wrote or said. I repeat that the reference to the 50's was my comment on Vance not anything he wrote or said, so you cannot deduce from that anything about his views beyond the views I described.
"The exception that proves the rule" as you are using it amounts to claiming that evidence against a proposition is evidence for it, and so contributes to fuzzy thinking. That isn't what the phrase means, at least in its origin, and lots of people use it that way because they want an excuse to ignore evidence against whatever claim they are supporting.
Yes, you hit one of my buttons.
> Yes, you hit one of my buttons.
We match then.
As for "the exception that proves the rule," I've encountered a lot of "present company excepted" among folks who otherwise hate people in job lots, based on categories. There's also a version where a member of a category is tolerated as long as they accept a subordinate position, aware that they exist on sufferance.
Vance may or may not associate Christian identification with his desired morality; I actually have no evidence. But it's pretty easy to find plenty of people who do make that identification with a morality somewhat like the one Vance appears to promote. If those people become his supporters, well, I also see no sign he's either principled on the subject, or likely to care provided his own family's non-conformism is politely ignored.
But I could certainly be wrong.
What's surprising me a lot is that you seem to approve of Vance. Of course, you might be bending over backwards to appear neutral, so as not to alienate his supporters if they do well.
You pushed a button of mine too. Phrases like "moral virtues" and almost any synonymn tend to make me see red. Too many vocal supporters of phrases of this kind have behaved exceedingly badly.
And Vance falling into this category tends to "confirm" a not-yet-demonstrated hypothesis about Vance's character based on one particular well-publicized event. Of course it doesn't really confirm anything - confirmation will take actual behaviour, and frequently takes decades before I'm 100% certain - by which time most people agree with me.
I think Vance is clearly dishonest, but he is also intelligent, which makes him interesting. And it is possible that his motives are benevolent, although by no means certain.
My point was not that having a Hindu wife (and writing very positively about her family) proves he isn't prejudiced against non-Christians, although it is evidence that he isn't. But "the exception proves the rule" used as you used it not only makes no sense, it is a way of pretending that evidence against is evidence for.
Sorry, I think I was using that figure of speech in a way you weren't expecting, and originally presuming you understood it the same way I did.
All I was intending to say was that the Hindu wife was, sadly, consistent with prejudice against non-Christians.
This would have been a lot clearer without that idiom.
Populism is indeed the opposite of libertarianism, no doubt about it.
And yet, even if every “accusation” of Vance both stated and implied here were 100% correct, the policies he advocates are still far more pro-growth, pro-freedom and less authoritarian than the policies of this year’s alternative: the border czar Harris-Biden regime.
And frankly it ain’t even close.
Libertarians are often called isolationists for opposing foreign military intervention. But Donald Trump and J D Vance are closer to being true isolationists. To my knowledge, the best example of isolationism is the 1603-1868 Japanese policy of Sakoku, which severely restricted foreign trade and foreign relations and prohibited most foreign nationals from entering Japan--and which was partly motivated by the desire to avoid foreign cultural influences.
I like to distinguish between non-interventionist and isolationist, the latter including barriers to trade.
I agree. That was my point. Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently explicit.
I have yet to see a rebuttal to the following argument: you need tariffs to offset the economic costs of your labor and environmental policies, or else the net incentive structure of your policies is “do business elsewhere.” The net incentive structure you want is, “do business here, or somewhere else that has a similar regulatory regime.”
Is there any argument against this?
Yes there is.
What we export and what we import depend on the relative costs of producing goods in the US, and that isn't changed by the costs you describe. Not the cost of producing cars in the US vs producing cars in China but the cost of producing cars in the US vs producing wheat in the US, those costs being in the same units. Comparing that ratio to the same ratio in China determines whether we import cars or wheat.
The economics of trade is really not something you can invent for yourself and expect to get right.
Or other counters:
How would you like it if some other country banned US imports because they thought our laws and regulations were too stringent?
EU countries mostly mandate more vacation, government health care, and so on, than US countries, or so I have heard. How would you like it if they banned US imports?
Country A has free health care but only allows 1 week of vacation a year. Country B has private health care but mandates a month of vacation a year. Do they bothban each other's imports?
The world economy would grind to a halt.
I think his point is that by mandating more vacation, Europe is essentially banning exports and/or mandating imports. These policies make their products more expensive and therefore uncompetitive with foreign options. If Europe wants to maintain productive industries (or anything competitive) then it would need to balance the costs of their own regulations against foreign competitors selling for cheaper for lack of that regulation.
I'm generally in favor of not mandating the vacation (let the workers and owners negotiate) and also not putting in tariffs. Let the chips fall where they may, to general benefit. But if you're going to mandate the vacation (and environmental protection, and whatever), you've already burdened your local employment. Putting your thumb on the scale against your own people.
I think this is especially important in regards to something like CO2 production. Whatever you think about the climate implications, if the West is requiring expensive alternatives and China isn't, then China gets a huge competitive advantage while also still producing massive amounts of CO2. That's hurting the West no matter what you think about climate change.
Yes. It's none of the government's business.
Liberty. It's even in the dictionary.
If people in some other country don't agree with other countries' laws and regulations, are they somehow less entitled to work? If you don't want to buy the fruit of their labor, don't; but you have no right to prevent me from buying it.
Have you ever thought about how immoral the very concept of modern unions is? Striking workers have quit their jobs, and he government forbids their former employer from hiring replacements. And unions can be monopolies, but not employers.
Forget closed shop states. Government has already stacked the deck, twice, in unions' favor. How is that fair or moral?
If you want to pay higher prices, go ahead, no one's stopping you. Don't make me pay tariffs because you have a guilty conscience. You remind me of billionaires who want the government to raise taxes; hey, rich jerk, the IRS would be delighted if you just sent them some extra. Why do you think I should have to pay also to assuage your guilt conscience?
No. Government should just butt out. It's none of their business.
Unions: one man, one vote, one time (for all time).
Another possibility for the results of a trade imbalance is that American money comes back as debt. We borrow our money back from China, potentially to purchase more goods from China. Long term, that makes us beholden to the Chinese economy both for the physical goods that they produce and then also for the debt we use to finance our lifestyles. In the short term this is obviously to our huge advantage - we consume all the goods without having to produce them. That's very short term thinking though, as eventually we have nothing to trade and China is controlling all of our debt. This lets them purchase our land, businesses, whatever has long term value in exchange for the debt we've taken on. I guess we could default, which gives us some leverage over the Chinese. This doesn't feel like it's sustainable or desirable to me, though.
Another thought - the US economy as a whole isn't all that we care about. For instance, if one person controlled all of a $100 trillion economy, and the remainder of the citizens were slaves, we wouldn't consider this positive even though that's a huge economy compared to now. If I understand Vance correctly, he's looking at a US economy that's much larger than it used to be, but that the benefits of the economy are poorly distributed. More specifically, people without a college degree are receiving far less from this economy compared to those with more education and in certain fields. It's a great time to be in Tech still, but a bad time to be a farmer, machinist, or fork lift driver. Given that most people even in the US do not have college degrees, it appears that our current economy is not as beneficial for the majority of our citizens. We're somewhere along the road to that one person having all scenario. If we agree that one person owning it all is bad, then there's got to be an inflection point where few enough people benefit that we no longer consider the economy good, even if it's growing.
I've been very supportive of a free market in my lifetime, because I see the benefits of open trade in a "raising all boats" kind of way. If that's changed (and I'm not saying it has), then that would be a reason to reevaluate.
Vance seems to be saying that it's changed, that we've reached or are heading towards a bad result. If he's accurate about that, then "overall" numbers aren't answering the question. Or to put it more simply but less accurately - if the Finance sector and Tech sector are both growing massively while all the other sectors are dying, and less people work in Finance and Tech, then there's a problem even if the US as a country seems to be doing very well.
That's beside the point about whether the US has the industrial capacity to win a war. If we're beholden to Chinese industry for our war materials, then that gives them a geopolitical advantage over us as well. How much that's true is difficult to assess. Unfortunately, that's the kind of problem that gets worse with time (if, say, all the competent machinists retire) and is harder to fix.
The relevant borrowing is, I suspect, mostly by government, to finance the budget deficit, although I don't have any data. If they balanced the budget the trade deficit would drop sharply. Given the existence of the budget deficit, the alternative to having it financed by foreigners is having it financed by Americans at a somewhat higher interest rate, with capital those Americans could instead have invested in American firms.
I mentioned the argument about distribution in my first Vance post, where I wrote:
" If a tariff on auto imports makes midwestern auto workers richer and west coast programmers poorer that may, from Vance’s standpoint, be a net gain — Silicon Valley programmers are not the people he cares about."
That's obviously possible, but I haven't seen Vance, or anyone else, actually make that argument and support it with evidence that the people trade benefits are substantially richer than the people it harms. As I pointed out in the same post, agriculture is also an export industry.
Another possibility is that Vance rejects the assumption that individual consumers correctly evaluate their own interests. There is at least one place where he implies that reducing consumption of good imported from China isn't a bad thing because the goods in question are not worth buying. That fits with the implication in his book that his people are not making economically rational decisions, are blowing money on expensive XMas presents to prove to others that they are not really poor.
Assuming it is true that incomes are becoming more unequal, why would you think that free trade is the reason? I can think of more plausible alternatives.
I think free trade that's enabled by government borrowing is *a* problem. I don't think it's a singular *the* problem. Big picture, the government spends a lot of money on direct and indirect redistribution. Social programs, welfare, contracts to companies to provide services of dubious worth/need. If a poor family in WV buys Chinese junk from Walmart that's subsidized by welfare payments from the government that is in turn borrowed from the Chinese - that's an unsustainable cycle that hurts the poor family in several ways. We can blame them for individual choices made, but no one thinks they would be rich without buying that Xbox.
The economy is too complex for us to determine exactly who benefits and who is harmed by free trade. I think we can determine a few heuristics though - someone without a job is at least not served by the economy. Someone making significantly more than median is. So on some level it's true that SV programmers are winning from [the overall free trade economy] while WV coal miners are not.
By this measure I personally am benefitted by free trade - I make above median and have a home/car/family. I know an awful lot of people who are not benefitted using this kind of broad measure. It's easy for me to appreciate free trade and think it's very beneficial. That said, I am openminded to the possibility that I'm wrong on the aggregate, and that there may be a better system (or hybrid, or adjustments) that would benefit more people. I struggle with what that would look like, because ultimately I agree with you that tariffs will cost more than the benefit they produce. Other interventions feel the same. It's easy for me to say "reduce regulations" but ultimately I don't think even a completely unregulated manufacturing sector can outcompete Chinese prices. Costs in the US are higher because we are overall richer, so even if there were no added costs the Chinese labor is still cheaper enough for them to outcompete our labor on most things. Retraining seems to me mostly to be a sham - older workers will struggle to learn entirely new skills, and not everyone is well equipped for the types of work we have available. I'm not sure what else is available, so I find myself sympathetic to those who want protectionism.
" but ultimately I don't think even a completely unregulated manufacturing sector can outcompete Chinese prices."
Chinese prices are in Yuan, American prices in dollars. Until you have a theory of what determines the exchange rate between them, what I just quoted from you is meaningless, like saying you don't think your height will ever be more than your weight.
You are thinking in terms of 18th century economics, when almost everyone was on a gold standard so you could compare prices across countries and trade adjusted by flows of gold changing domestic prices instead of by exchange rates.
Instead of repeating my explanation of the economics of trade I will point you at the post that has it:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/ptolemaic-trade-theory
"There is a sense in which trade always balances; if an American sells a dollar for Chinese Yuan to buy Chinese goods..." --
US companies are not constrained by a lack of investment, so to the extent that the CCPs mercantilism forces the US to either engage in borrowing or suffer unemployment, it probably drives US government deficits. The social negatives to long term unemployment, even with generous public assistance transfers, are quite large. It also doesn't feel especially libertarian.
My feeling is with the way the world currently operates, the choice isn't between free trade and protectionism, but a choice between an active industrial policy that aims to enforce comparative advantage (like Bancor, Import certificates, capital controls) or a passive industrial policy that amounts to the culmination of all other governments choices and the various distortions those cause. (Strong dollar, trade deficits, unnaturally weak industry, etc.)
I don't understand why you think "the CCPs mercantilism forces the US to either engage in borrowing or suffer unemployment." It isn't that China somehow (how?) forces us to import more than we export and we then have to borrow from them. The fact that we are borrowing is the reason imports are more than exports. The US ran a trade deficit for much of the 19th century because we were building canals and railroads with European money.
From the following:
https://americancompass.org/bad-trade/
https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2017/05/will-a-smaller-fiscal-deficit-cause-the-trade-deficit-to-decline-or-unemployment-to-rise?lang=en
Not asking you to read it in its entirety, but there's a table at the bottom of the second article that sort of explains my logic. CLT+F "Different Impacts"
My assumption for the US today corresponds to: "The U.S. capital account is driven mainly by the independent decision of foreign investors to invest excess global savings." and "Desired investment is broadly in line with actual investment"
But in the 19th century the assumption was probably that "The U.S. capital account is driven by trade, and mainly reflects the need to finance the deficit." and "Desired investment exceeds actual investment"
A lower fiscal deficit might increase business confidence, increasing actual investment opportunities in the US, but it might also increase the desire of foreigners to lend to the US (well in excess of investment needs).
To finance what deficit? Europeans were lending money to American rail and canal companies to build railroads and dig canals. I don't know if the federal government was running a deficit, but total government spending, federal, state, and local, was about 10% of GNP and the federal was the smallest of the three, so federal spending wasn't a significant part of the economy.
Sorry : "The U.S. capital account is driven by trade, and mainly reflects the need to finance the (trade) deficit" -- i.e. lending to a developing country because said country has a lot of investment opportunities relative to domestic savings.
Although many people critical of these movements like comparing European right-wing populists to Trump, I don't think this usually makes much sense, and these European parties aren't even very similar to each other, other than favouring a more restrictive immigration policy. E.g. Norway's Fremskrittspartiet was founded as an anti-tax party and still is considered a liberal (not in the US sense) party, whereas Sweden's Sverigedemokraterna was founded as a nationalist party, considers itself a conservative party and isn't too concerned with reducing the size of the government other than when it comes to spending less money on immigrants. I'm not aware of trade policy being a hot issue in any European country.
BRUSSELS (AP) [July 8, 2024] — Far-right parties from 12 countries, including France’s National Rally and Hungary’s ruling Fidesz, announced on Monday that they have joined together to form a new bloc in the European Parliament and plan to become a major political force.
Thanks for the examples of right wing parties. I'm working on a post on the European New Right, trying to figure out what they have in common with each other or what Vance wants. Several of the ones mentioned above were ones I missed.
I believe National Rally and Brothers of Italy are both protectionist at present, although not necessarily throughout their history. So far the common elements among the European New Right parties seem to be opposition to immigration, at least from poor countries, opposition to Islam, and Euroskepticism.
ECR is another bloc in the EU Parliament of about the same size which is also labelled right-wing populist, and ESN is a smaller one. There appear to be strong incentives for parties to join blocs.
“ Whatever you might think of these policies, evidence slowly accumulated that they failed to address a very real social crisis among the Republican base. ”
You cited this quote to claim Vance was dissing and disavowing Milton Friedman and his policies. But quite apart from the fact that he was being a politician (even though he hadn’t announced any campaign back then), all he said was that the policies failed to address this other thing - a “social crisis”.
He didn’t disavow such MF economic policies. All he said was that said policies were insufficient.
Which frankly the rest of your piece articulates well.
Yes, I confess that someone explicitly not making economic growth prime (over anything save national security) is not optimal for those of us with classical liberal values.
But that’s very different from saying that he is actively hostile to pro-growth policies.
P.S. by contrast, I agree with you 100% on your characterization of Trump’s views (“ That suggests that Vance should want less low and medium skill immigration, more high skill, fewer factory workers and more physicians. Trump seems inclined in that direction.”). Admittedly we have a lot more data on Trump than on Vance. But your commentary, while interesting, seems a lot more appropriate for the 2027 GOP primary season than the one we are in now.
Classical liberalism doesn't imply that economic growth is the highest value but that human welfare is. Economic growth is likely to increase human welfare, but it doesn't have to, since there are costs as well as benefits. Consider an illiberal policy of high taxes used to finance investment.
Yes, I understand - and agree - with this point.
The American Mind piece you shared the link for imo made your case about Vance’s problematic economics views much more strongly than what you included in this piece.
If I run a negative credit card balance every month I will be more and more in debt to the credit card company. That's fun while I'm spending but less fun while I'm paying.
If I stop paying they could at some point decide to repossess everything I own. This is even more explicit if I was selling the assets to fund ongoing consumption.
I guess I could just default and stick them with the bill, or the nation could nationalize assets that foreigners own or decide not to pay interest on securities they own. Fun for us, not fun for the Chinese people that saved and saved and then got stiffed.
And honestly probably not fun for us either if it came to a point.
Now, if you think all the money China lent us was invested into things that will generate returns to pay them back, then I guess all is well. If you're skeptical of that, then we ran up a huge credit card bill and someone (us, them, or both) are going to get stuck with it.
I would have preferred a more sustainable pattern of specialization and trade that wasn't so reliant on giant IOUs from poor Chinese to rich Americans mediated by a authoritarian government with an artificial currency peg.
“ I would have preferred a more sustainable pattern of specialization and trade that wasn't so reliant on giant IOUs from poor Chinese to rich Americans mediated by an authoritarian government with an artificial currency peg.”
Sorry, you are conflating the very real problem of America having too much debt - where I agree with you - with the wrong-notioned mercantilist idea of balanced trade.
At least if it is the welfare of U.S. citizens, rather than Chinese ones, that you are concerned about.
It does indeed help the U.S., in multiple ways, that China has so many dollar-denominated assets.
AFAIK, we have had persistent trade deficits for decades with Germany, France and even the U.K. Are such deficits problematic for the American citizenry in ANY material way?
There are several valid reasons to “go after” China via tariffs - human rights, use of slave labor, national security, intellectual property theft, hell, even the often-vague “unfair trade practices that limit our access to certain of their markets” (pretty sure DF would agree with me on all of these save the last one) - but our trade balance with China and how many dollar-denominated assets the Chinese hold is NOT one of them.
Let me start by promising that I am not an economist and David Friedman may eat my lunch with this comment :-)
There is no such thing as a trade deficit. With fiat money, dollars out HAVE TO equal dollars in. No foreigner is going to accept dollars as payment for our imports unless they can use those dollars to buy American goods, or buy other goods from other foreigners who will in turn buy American goods.
Further to that is the "well known" (to me) comparison to individual people. My employer has a ginormous trade deficit with all its employees. I have an enormous trade deficit with every store I shop at. And yet, somehow I have no trade deficit! That's exactly analogous to the US having a trade deficit with China or any other individual country. It is utterly meaningless.
Then there;s the fact of leaving out of the trade deficit the investments made in America by foreigners. Suppose foreigners earn $1T a month in dollars from their exports / our imports. They buy $900B of American exports and use the remaining $100B to buy businesses, golf courses, hotels, and Disney sweaters, plus pay salaries of their American employees and office space for them. And yet dishonest people call that a deficit.
It's all nonsense. Dollars out equal dollars in, unless those wily furriners have discovered they can get more heat from a pound of currency than a pound of coal, or they like wallpapering their house in dollar bills.
Dollars can be spent buying TBills or shares of stock and keeping them in the US, so although dollars sold equal dollars bought, imports don't have to equal exports. A trade deficit is a capital inflow.
I included Tbills and shares in what foreigners buy, and meant that dollars in and out have to match including that. I apologize for not being clear, and thank you for not eating my lunch ....
My understanding is that it is more common for high-skill Americans to prefer high-skill over low-skill immigration than the reverse. I am in this boat, because a large majority of my life is spent interacting with what Garett Jones calls the O-ring sector.
In particular, the public school system is effectively in the O-ring sector, and a large majority of the upper middle class still uses it. A significant increase in the local low-skill population will drive the probability of my kids receiving a similar-or-better-quality public school education as I received down to ~zero. In my calculus, the economic complementarity discussed in this post is barely even at the level of a rounding error in comparison to this consideration.
“ My understanding is that it is more common for high-skill Americans to prefer high-skill over low-skill immigration than the reverse. ”
Your understanding may well have been correct even 15 years ago, but it demonstrably is not the case now.
Democrats are the party of college-“educated”, high-skill citizens and also the party of deliberate, explicit support for mass illegal immigration of overwhelmingly low-skill immigrants.
To the extent that this policy is not actually thought highly of by the majority of Democrat voters, it is disproportionately the highly educated Dem voters who support the policy.
The current facts are the current facts.
Your first sentence can be (and I believe is) incorrect even while sentences 2-3 are directionally true.
I wish you were right.
I’m pretty sure you are not.
If your point is that high-skill Democrats are ALSO open to more high- skill immigration, I won’t deny that.
But my point is that they are the ones disproportionately supporting the Dems *current* position on immigration - allowing millions of overwhelmingly low-skill immigrants into the country, knowing full well most will not show up for their hearings scheduled for months later.
I think I saw some stats on this once - maybe check Rob Henderson? - but I don’t know and cannot be sure.
I will tell you anecdotally most of my liberal friends have been in support of the border czar Harris-Biden’s policy. And you surely don’t deny that a) lower-income Dems and b) blacks do *not* support the policy as much (if net at all), correct?
Given that SOMEONE still supports the Harris-Biden border policies, if it ain’t lower income, and it ain’t blacks, who do you think it is?!? Hispanics are actually kinda split on this - which is a large part of why Trump’s numbers among Hispanics have gone up so much over the last 8 years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/immigration-attitudes-and-the-2024-election/
Per Pew:
In 2021, about 63% of Democrats supported Biden's handling of immigration.
By late 2022, this had fallen to around 51%.
Recent polling in 2024 shows approval is now in the range of 43-45%
Now if you have numbers that say that show that high-skill (college educated) Democrats do NOT support the border czar Harris-Biden border policies of the last 3.7 years, I’d love to see them.
My claim was about "high-skill Americans", not "high-skill Democrats".
But since highly educated is the best proxy we have for high skill, its is now a fact that close to 2/3rds of those people vote Democrat.
You and I (perhaps I should speak only for myself, idk) are in a shrinking minority…
If your *only* point is that a majority of “high skill Americans” favor more high skill immigration, then yes that’s likely to be true.
But in the context of this piece, which was talking about all immigration, and primarily about low-skill immigration from illegal immigrants, the fact remains that it is the highest skilled Democrat voters who *most* favor the current policy of bringing in millions of low-skill illegal immigrants.
And in practice given the politics of the country, there is close to zero chance we will get more high skill immigration while one party insists on bringing in millions of low-skill illegal immigrants. As should be obvious to anyone paying attention.
And the party that wants - and has been implementing that policy full throttle for the last 3.5+ years - is the party of the highly-skilled. Or as Richard Hanania calls it, “Elite Human Capital”.
So whether intentional or not, it is high-skill Americans who are disproportionately responsible for the fact that we don’t have more high-skill immigration.
Canada is the foreign country most culturally similar to the US, and Australia and New Zealand are not far behind. Liberal parties in all three have had no problem favoring high-skill immigration over low[1]; the US is actually the odd country out among the Anglosphere settler colonies.
This doesn't mean that Brazilification of the US is impossible, but it's far from preordained at this time. Especially because China is presenting a genuine challenge to American power, has leadership that doesn't even have qualms about restricting internal migration of low-skill *natives*[2], and much of the American upper middle class stands to lose big if China does manage to end American dominance. The Democrats may want to cut things as close as possible, but they don't want to actually lose Taiwan.
1: Yes, the Canadian implementation is somewhat corrupted right now, but the current liberal leadership is expected to face heavy electoral punishment for their role in this. I expect the Canadian public school system will remain at a quality level that I'd consider acceptable for my own kids.
2: I don't endorse China's hukou system; my point is that we don't have a totally uncontrolled experiment.
Is Vance actually considered to be handsome?
My ex wife thinks so. Many middle aged women seem smitten with his piercing color enhancing contact blue eyes, full head of hair, facial hair, and eyeliner. Sans the eyeliner, I'm told he looks like a feminized lumberjack. Plus he's young enough, rich enough, and not morbidly obesee.
By whom? Is there one standard?