Lew Rockwell Institute

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REVEALED: How Barack Obama Secretly Worked Behind the Scenes to Sabotage Kamala Harris | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Sam Neill is right. America is not a happy place.

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Kevin Duffy wrote:

Hi Lew,

How are these “reciprocal tariffs” being calculated?  

By country: “Tariffs Charged to U.S.A.” = trade deficit / imports.

According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, “This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing.” 

What if they’re not?  What if other factors might be involved: 

– Low savings 

– High government borrowing 

– Direct foreign investment 

– Indirect foreign investment (stocks) 

– Willingness of foreign central banks to hold U.S. dollars as reserve currency 

The economic illiteracy, hubris and recklessness of the people behind these decisions (Trump, Vance, Lutnick, Bessent and Miran) is truly staggering.

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Antiwar.com 

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My cover story article in the current issue of The New American.  The issue includes a promotion of the Mises Institute’s new documentary on the Fed, “Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve” which has 716,000 views on YouTube as of today, less than six months from its release.

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With Robert Breedlove.  

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“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing,” Trump said in a telephone interview. “It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.”

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The American Conservative

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President Trump is determining equivalent reciprocal tariffs, considering remedies, and estimating fiscal impacts on the national government and information-collection costs to the public.

Fast, extensive change, even change that’s initially for the worse, works out best for freedom. Even so, tariff increases have done serious harm and have persisted for decades.

It’s worth discussing constitutionality, harms, dynamics, and options.

Constitutionality

Tariffs unconstitutionally deprive each person of a different proportion of his liberty, as do all revenue sources other than fully flat taxes on labor income.

Setting tariffs is archetypal legislative power. Tariffs raise revenue, so they must originate in the current house of representatives.

Tariff agreements, though, are treaties. Treaties are law, and remote collaboration is practical now. All treaties should be drafted by the current senate and the other nations’ authorities, passed if they’d be helpful, and signed by the current president if they’re advisable and enforceable.

Harms When Unfree

People build up skills as they work together. People can live in their homes but provide their skilled work to people elsewhere by selling products to others, through trade.

When the scarcest resource, people’s time, is put to more-valued uses by people by performing more-skilled work that they can sell to customers, both the producers and the customers benefit.

Tariffs get in the way.

Tariffs make marginal producers unprofitable, so tariffs reduce supplies, which increases prices. Increased prices must get paid, by producers who buy intermediate products and by customers.

Government people take a bigger cut, making us less free.

Investment returns get unknowable, so producers forgo investment. America’s Great Depression was prolonged by similar regime uncertainty.

Domestic producers grow increasingly uncompetitive and end up losing business and cutting jobs.

Harms When Unbalanced

People who export more than they import need to invest their accumulating foreign money. These people—including China’s government people—invest in their customers’ assets.

Customers can become more productive and earn more. Investors earn returns.

But these investments are driven by excesses of foreign money more than by opportunities, and excess money bids up prices. For example, prices get higher for family farms, and this makes returns lower and riskier.

Also, compared to engaged local investors, passive foreign investors can’t add as much value.

Strengthening a Major Enemy Government

China’s government people have long been taking unconventional-warfare actions against the USA’s people. If the USA’s people would keep helping the Chinese people build up more resources that China’s government people could take for war, this wouldn’t help the USA’s people or China’s people.

USA government people could block the USA’s people trade with China’s people until China’s government people stop their warfare actions against the USA’s people. As this continued, freer nations’ people would increasingly outproduce China’s more-coerced people. When freer governments’ people have significantly outproduced the more-coercive governments’ people, major wars haven’t started.

Dynamics

With tariff reciprocity, the USA government people would change their tariffs to match other government people’s tariffs. Helpfully, this strategy would be intuitive to the USA people and to other nations’ people.

The USA government people currently have lower tariffs than many other government people have, so the USA government people’s first move to match tariffs would raise many tariffs.

When one nation’s government people have raised their tariffs, usually other nations’ government people have raised their tariffs still higher. The political consensus that had previously pushed tariffs high has just pushed tariffs higher.

In the Great Depression era Smoot-Hawley tariffs, USA legislators pushed tariff duties up by a typical proportion, 20%.

Meanwhile, some people were going bankrupt. Other people’s bank deposits weren’t backed fully by reserves, so these people tried to withdraw their money, and banks failed, destroying the unbacked money. Very quickly, customers had far-less money to buy products, and producers had to significantly lower prices.

Two-thirds of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were assessed at fixed dollar rates per unit of product. At the new lower prices, these fixed tariffs became much-higher percentages of the products’ values. Legislators didn’t lower these fixed tariffs to return to the original percentages. As a result, the legislators’ Fed-executed boom and bust, together with the legislators’ failures to adjust these fixed tariffs, ended up pushing up the resulting percentage tariffs by an additional 30%.

Raising the tariffs from 40% to 59% took 2 years. Lowering the tariffs from 59% to 12% took 22 years.

During these 22 years, the legislators’ Fed-executed money inflation raised nominal prices. The legislators had passed most tariffs as fixed dollar rates per unit of product, so these tariffs became lower percentages of the products’ values. This produced most of the tariff-rate reduction, 71%. Negotiations only produced the remaining much-smaller reduction, 29%.

Nowadays most tariffs are set as percentages. Inflation won’t reduce these tariffs at all.

Trade negotiations have a strong track record of producing favors to cronies, but a weak track record of producing free trade.

Unilateral Repeals

In our roles as customers for final products, and as workers for producers that use intermediate products, the USA people would gain the most from getting USA tariffs unilaterally repealed.

In our roles as workers for producers that export products, the USA people would gain the most from helping get other governments’ tariffs fully repealed.

Moving towards trade reciprocity could initiate valuable change.

Still, politics and history strongly suggest that other nations’ governments might not reduce tariffs, or might not reduce tariffs much. It would be sensible to equally lean towards freedom.

To lean towards freedom, initially set USA government tariffs at 1/2 of other governments’ tariffs, category-by-category. Subsequently match other governments’ moves, whether higher or lower, to maintain this lean towards freedom. Applying this same generous factor to each tariff from each government that isn’t a major enemy would be forceful, but simultaneously would beckon towards freedom.

In the bigger picture, success breeds success. Minimize spending and regulation, and the resulting enviable freedom and success will be the best incentives for everybody.

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The county of Burma or Myanmar has seen its share of natural disasters. A devasting cyclone in 2008 killed tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands more homeless. To make things worse, the country has suffered from internal conflict for 50 years, and is currently in the midst of a civil war.

Last month it was a devasting 7.7 earthquake that hit Myanmar. Over 2,000 people are confirmed dead, thousands are injured, and countless numbers of people are still buried.

The United States has pledged $2 million in aid. The Trump administration has been criticized for not responding fast enough because of cuts to USAID. Meanwhile, China has scored a public relations win by sending 400 Chinese personnel and providing $14 million in aid.

Just what does this mean that the United States has pledged $2 million in aid? I don’t recall pledging to send money to Myanmar, and neither do any of my family or friends. I also don’t recall pledging to send money to the federal government to send to Myanmar, and neither do any of my family or friends.

It is the U.S. government that has pledged the $2 million. And where did the U.S. government get the $2 million it will send to Myanmar? There are only two possibilities. The federal government can simply print the money or it can take the money out of the wallets, pockets, and purses of Americans in the form of taxes. There are no other options. The federal government has no money of its own unless it sells some of the land or assets it owns.

But without U.S. aid, won’t more people fail to be rescued in Myanmar? Won’t more people be homeless? Won’t more people suffer? Won’t more children get sick or starve? Won’t more people die?

Perhaps.

But that is not the point. The point is simply this: Should the U.S. government be taking money from Americans and using it for relief efforts in Myanmar?

Of course not. Disaster relief is just as Illegitimate as foreign aid.

There was a time in this country when it was recognized to be improper for the federal government to provide humanitarian relief even within the United States.

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the Texas Seed Bill to appropriate $10,000 for the purchase of seed grain for some farmers in Texas who had lost their crops due to a drought. Cleveland stated in his veto message:

 I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution; and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadily resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.

When Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, Congressman (and future president) James Madison objected, saying: “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Congressman Davy Crockett explained his opposition to a congressional attempt to help the widow of a naval officer: “We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”

If it is unconstitutional for the federal government to provide disaster relief to Americans, then it is certainly even more unconstitutional for the federal government to provide disaster relief to foreigners or their governments. Although domestic relief is clearly an illegitimate purpose of the federal government, foreign relief is even more so. I would certainly rather see American taxpayer money go to Americans than to foreigners. After all, Americans are the ones paying the taxes.

This doesn’t mean that I dislike foreigners or wish them ill will. It just means that I believe in the Constitution, limited government, federalism, property rights, and individual freedom.

The case of Myanmar is actually a test of one’s commitment to the freedom philosophy. A free society includes the freedom to be unconcerned, insensitive, or stingy.

Although any American is certainly welcome to contribute to the relief effort in Myanmar, no one should be forced to do so via his taxes or otherwise. There is no doubt in my mind that Americans would give liberally to alleviate the suffering of the people of Myanmar if the federal government just did nothing. But whether Americans give or don’t give, it is still the case that it should be the decision of each individual American. All charity and relief—domestic or foreign—should be private and voluntary.

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Last week I was one of the featured speakers at a conference in Texas hosted by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Ron Paul himself hosted the events. He will be 90 years old later this year and is still speaking out through a daily TV show and a weekly column.

The other main speakers were David Stockman, who was President Reagan’s budget director; Tom Woods, host of a leading national podcast; Jeff Deist, head of a company called Monetary Metals; and Daniel McAdams, a foreign policy expert.

Many of my Focus columns have been picked up and re-published on several popular national websites, and I was honored to be asked to speak at this conference, which had attendees from all over the country.

Stockman was elected to Congress from Michigan and served just four years before being asked to join Reagan’s cabinet. He has been a very successful financial advisor over the years and has authored several books.

He told the conference that he has just written a new book giving specific details on how to cut more than two trillion dollars from the federal budget.

He said the trendlines show we will double our $37 trillion national debt in ten years or less. If we let that happen, social security payments and other incomes will buy very little.

Tom Woods is a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. from Columbia. He has one of the nation’s most popular podcasts, and he has had both me and Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs on his show several times. In his speech, he told how he and millions of others, especially young people, have been inspired by Ron Paul’s message and campaigns in favor of economic freedom, limited government, and especially opposition to unnecessary wars.

Jeff Deist formerly headed the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, working with students and scholars on economics education. Now he is with Monetary Metals, a company that pays interest on gold its clients own.

Deist is also a political historian and he gave an interesting talk on how most of Donald Trump’s conservative populism and anti-war views came out of what is sometimes called the Old Right of the 1930s and 40s on up to the America First books, speeches, and television campaigns of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s.

Daniel McAdams, the foreign policy expert, gave a talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of President Trump’s actions so far. He applauded the efforts of the president toward ceasefires in Israel and Ukraine.

He expressed great concern about sending more bombs to Israel, the ending of the ceasefire there, the bombing of civilians in Yemen, and the actions against free speech for peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

In my presentation at the conference, I quoted the popular Jewish podcaster Dave Smith, who said Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was “horrific and inexcusable,” and that going to war in Iran would be “insane.”

The so-called neo-conservatives like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz – neither of whom ever served in the military – were the leading cheerleaders for the war in Iraq.

Now, neo-cons want us to join Israel in a war against Iran. The conservative columnist George Will once wrote that neo-cons were “magnificently misnamed” and that they were really “the most radical people in this city,” meaning Washington, D.C.

Libertarian conservatives are afraid that Trump might go along with Netanyahu in a war against Iran because Miriam Adelson supposedly gave $100 million to the Trump campaign and several other Jewish billionaires also gave millions in return for promises to support Israel in any and every way.

In 1956, Israel demanded that the U.S. join it in a war against Egypt over the Suez Canal. Mitchell Bard wrote in The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned that he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”

Eisenhower did this only a week before the 1956 election.

We have not had a president with the courage to stand up to Israel since then. In fact, our foreign policy in the Middle East today is Israel First, and has created much animosity and even hatred for the U.S. I said in my talk that our Congress would have condemned any other country if it had killed as many thousands of little children as Israel has in the last year and a half.

Also in my presentation, I explained my vote against going to war in Iraq despite tremendous pressure to vote for it. I wish I had mentioned that I also voted to get out of Afghanistan many years before we did. If we had gotten out many years earlier, the 13 U.S. soldiers, including a young man from Gibbs, who were killed at the end might still be alive today.

This originally appeared on The Knoxville Focus.

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