Methods Versus Intentions

     Beware the man who claims that his intentions constitute an authorization to control your methods. Not all such persons are Democrats, though they do constitute an unhealthy majority thereof. Some are Republicans who, like former (or ersatz) Republican Michael Bloomberg, simply think you’re an ignoramus who doesn’t know what’s best for you.

     Much of the defamation aimed at the free market arises from such persons. Unfortunately, many of them are smart enough, and accomplished enough in their chosen occupations, to command more respect for their political opinions than is good for us. I have an example here:

     Conservative intellectuals launch a new group to challenge free-market ‘fundamentalism’ on the right

     Oren Cass believes conservatives have blundered by outsourcing GOP economic policymaking to libertarian “fundamentalists” who see the free market as an end unto itself, rather than as a means for improving quality of life to strengthen families and communities. The former domestic policy director on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign quit his job as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute to launch a new group called American Compass that aims to reorient the right...

     Markets are good, Cass explained, but life is about so much more than markets. He said American conservatism historically had a richer conception of the role of government beyond maximizing returns, such as strengthening domestic industry. He lamented the growing concentration of wealth, geographically on the coasts and in the big cities, as well as in a handful of industries, which has accelerated income inequality...

     I’ve seen emissions like this many times. They tend to come from self-styled “ur-conservatives” who seek to return to pre-Cobden mercantilism and the strong protectionist measures it featured. It’s a thinly veiled form of collectivism that implicitly promotes the writer’s notions about what’s best over the freedom of others to produce and trade as they please. Note in particular the phrase “a richer conception of the role of government” in the above. Reflect on what that “role” could – and would – embrace.

     I’m not here to argue about “what’s best.” Plenty of opinion-mongers past and present have done so, with little agreement to be found among them. On the anti-free-market side they tend to lament the dwindling of what they often call “human values,” a trend they attribute to the free market and “commercialism.” The late Robert Nisbet, prominent among them, became well known for his opinion that America’s markets – hardly free at the time – might be “too efficient.” By what standard would Nisbet judge them “too efficient?” He was concerned, he said, with how they impede “life on a human scale.” It’s what R. A. Lafferty called “a good round thumping phrase,” eminently suitable for stump speeches. However, objectively speaking it means nothing.

     The resurgence of such thinking in the Right is more disturbing than most persons would imagine.

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     At this time, President Trump is employing tariffs to correct for an aberration in international commerce. Specifically, he has targeted other countries’ governments’ use of subsidies and tariff barriers: the former to give chosen industries an edge in international trade; the latter to prevent American goods from competing with industries domestic to those countries. By using tariffs as a measure by which to compensate for such anticompetitive behavior, Trump has put our trading partners on notice: What you can do to us, we can do to you – and we will. It’s an important component of his successful strategy for correcting America’s loss of manufacturing jobs and its international trade balances.

     Yes, it’s a seeming departure from free-market absolutism. However, when one’s partners have already tilted the ice, there’s no corrective but to force it back to level by such a countermeasure. In some cases a tariff war can “run away.” That happened in the Thirties, with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the responses of our trading partners to it. But when Trump has achieved the results he sought, he’s lifted the relevant tariff, though always with the sotto voce message that a return to bad behavior by the targeted nation would see it swiftly restored.

     Trump understands free markets. He’s spoken in favor of them many times. He understands full well that a market in which one participant has coercive power on his side, helping to fuel his efforts and retard those of his competitors, is not free.

     More to the point of this tirade, the “free market” is a shorthand phrase for an aspect of freedom itself: the right to trade one’s products and services (including one’s labor) with consenting others, without interference from a government. It is a method by which free people pursue what they think is best.

     And here we come to the nub of the thing: What commentators such as Robert Nisbet and Oren Cass think is best might differ from what you think is best, and dramatically at that. That does not authorize them to rule your preferences wrong and demand that you accept theirs.

     I could go on about this, but I believe the point is made. We each have our methods for pursuing and defending our visions of what’s best. When someone else tells you that his vision of what’s best entitles him to limit your freedom – i.e., to constrain or condition your methods for pursuing your contrasting vision – reject that person. He wants to control you, and no matter how benign he seems that’s something you must not tolerate.

     Maintain your vigilance. You know what depends on it.

An Unasked Question

     Typically, the most important questions are the ones no one is asking. However, that qualifying adjective is important, too: some questions aren’t asked because no one sincerely cares about the subject – or the answer.

     Here’s one: What is “free trade,” really? And the follow-up: Why are “free trade agreements” always hundreds of pages long?

     You’d think the first of those two questions would qualify as important, especially in today’s environment of global marketing (and hyper-contentious politics). Well, if that were so, it would be a regular topic of discussion on the talking-head shows...but it isn’t.

     You see, no one involved in trade policy, trade negotiations, or the promulgation of economic nostrums cares to have those questions answered right out in front of God and everybody. Whatever they may say about “free trade,” it’s a matter of absolutely no interest to them. So, just as with many other phrases and positions, they use it as a shibboleth: a touchstone for evaluating potential allies and a verbal shield against their opponents.

     What matters to them, if “free trade” genuinely doesn’t? Ah, that’s the nub, isn’t it?

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     In Power and Market, the late Murray Rothbard presented a powerful unifying conception about kinds of human-government actions and interactions:

• Monadic: These are characterized by a single actor, regardless of whether he acts on others. In political economy, the actor is always a government (e.g., a ban on some good or service).
• Dyadic: These involve two active elements: one human (or private-sector organization) and one government. Their interaction is dictated by the government (e.g., taxation).
• Triadic: Here there are three active elements: two human, one government. The government dictates the ways in which the human elements must, may, and must not interact (e.g., trade regulation).

     Dr. Rothbard omitted the case of the international trade agreement from his paradigm. That may be because he saw the matter in terms of two discrete interactions: one government with organizations within its jurisdiction, on each side of the border. Alternately, we might view a “trade agreement” as a form of supra-government which sets terms for interacting private parties, in which case it fits the triadic scheme.

     An international trade agreement – the soi-disant “free trade” agreement – invariably imposes innumerable conditions upon the trading parties. Such an agreement typically specifies tariffs and restrictions that cover hundreds of products or product categories: massive impositions of rules and taxes upon the trades it covers. Wherefore, then, do we call that “free trade?”

     Isn’t this a misnomer? A deliberate attempt to disguise a massive governmental intrusion into commerce as something diametrically different? If so, why do the talking heads who claim to favor free trade permit it? Indeed, why do they assist in perpetuating the lie?

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     Free trade, in a world in which words have exact meanings, would be trade that is genuinely free: i.e., in which all that matters are the desires of the buyer and the seller. Free trade would not partake of governmental interference of any sort. Governments would not lay conditions upon it, would not tax it, would not subsidize it, and would not exclude particular categories of goods from it. Yet every “free trade” agreement of the postwar era involves some or all those intrusions.

     Governments are predatory, parasitic entities. Whereas individuals and private organizations live by production and trade, governments live by the sword. By their very nature, they incorporate an incentive structure and a dynamic that can never be altered:

• To grow without limit;
• To perpetually increase their power;
• To exact as much tribute as possible from their subjects.

     Therefore governments are opposed to genuinely free trade by their very nature. They will seek power over it – and they will seek power, and advantages over other governments, from it. When possible, they will disguise those aims with euphemisms and prattle about “national security” or the “common good.”

     If it were not so, we would not confront the farcical phenomenon of the thousand-page “free trade agreement” festooned from end to end by tariffs, regulations, qualifications, and exclusions. Intergovernmental negotiations over free trade would begin with a single question – “Are you for free trade in [some commodity or product]?” — and end with a yes or no reply. As this is not the case, it follows that governments neither permit free trade nor will they ever countenance it in the future.

     Yet while the government most likely to hurt you is the one closest to you, there is no government on Earth that’s not a danger to every living soul. Since we delegate the responsibility for our national defense to the federal government, a certain degree of federal supervision of international trade must go along with it:

• Trade in weapons;
• Trade in strategically vital materials;
• Trade in knowledge germane to weapons science.

     And indeed, the federal government has taken that role in Americans’ trade with other lands for many decades.

     But clearly, federal intrusions into trade go far beyond those areas, as do the intrusions of other national governments. At least, I can see no strategic aspect to peanuts, sugar, or imported tea.

     Most maneuvering over international trade is motivated by politicians’ desire to protect their friends, allies, and foreign clients. Why else would they seek the power to tariff or regulate international trade in shoes? Why else would they promote the importation of oil, especially at a time when the domestic production of oil and gas is breaking all records? Only a desire to direct revenue streams away from disfavored entities and toward favored ones could possibly explain it.

     Over the next few weeks we’ll hear many arguments over the Trump Administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. The Administration considers those items to be vital to the national security, and a good case can be made for that. But you will never hear any political-class advocate of “free trade” answer, directly and candidly, the questions I posed in the opening segment. Too many rice bowls are at stake. Oftentimes, the advocate’s own livelihood is one of them.

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     Now, as a sweetener for the above, somewhat caustic discussion, have an answer to a question virtually no one has asked lately. At least, it hasn’t been asked around the Fortress of Crankitude in a dog’s age:

How To Make Nesselrode Pie:

Author: Kate Wheeler
Serves: 8
Prep time: 25 mins
Cook time: 15 mins
Total time: 40 mins

Ingredients:
For crumb crust:
     1½ cup chocolate cookie crumbs
     2 tablespoons sugar
     ½ cup butter
For the filling:
     ½ cup finely diced candied fruit
     ⅓ cup rum
     1½ cup heavy cream, divided into ¾ c. and ¾ c.
     3 egg yolks
     2 tablespoons sugar
     1 tablespoon gelatin
     ⅓ cup cold water
     ½ cup sweetened chestnut puree
     1 teaspoon vanilla
     3 egg whites, beaten until stiff

Instructions:
For crumb crust:
     Process sugar and crumbs in food processor.
     Melt butter, combine with sugar and crumbs.
     Press into a 9 inch pie plate until firm.
     Bake at 325 degrees for about 15 minutes, let cool.
For the filling:
     Pour rum over the fruits, let macerate for at least one hour.
     Bring ¾ c. cream to a simmer. Beat egg yolks with sugar until pale yellow. Whisk in part of the hot cream, then return the eggs to the remainder of the cream and whisk over low heat until the mixture is thickened. Fold in chestnut puree.
     Meanwhile, sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a small bowl. When the gelatin has absorbed the water and the custard is thickened, whisk the gelatin into the cream and eggs mixture. Refrigerate until firm.
     Break up the firmed custard with some vigorous stirring. Beat the egg whites until stiff and whip the remaining cream. Fold the macerated fruits (with the rum), the whipped cream and the beaten egg whites into the chestnut custard mixture. Pour into the prepared pie shell.
     Chill until firm, and garnish with curls of chocolate.

     Enjoy – in very small portions.

Free Trade Versus “Free Trade”

     The esteemed Joanne Nova discourses on this critical point:

     Just as carbon trading has nothing to do with a free market, so it is with monster free trade deals like the TPP. The free market meme won the intellectual debate of the 20th Century, but now its good name gets used and abused to sell the idea it defeated – bigger-government.

     A real free market deal has only one page and a bunch of signatures. But it takes a lot of pages to list all the unfree parts and to spell it out in sub-sub-clauses that hurt or help thousands of businesses around the world. Who gets the sweetest deal out of the complexity — the card carrying networkers — those who schmooze up to the right minister or bureaucrat. The people who compete on price or quality alone would win in a real free market, and so would we as customers. Instead the document rewards the gatekeepers, the rulemakers, the industry with the best lobbyists and the monied set who can donate enough to the right causes to get a better deal.

     Tipping the scales at 5,544 pages — and an astonishing 2,056,560 words — the trade agreement is one of the longest documents The Daily Caller has ever encountered. … The Bible: Authorized King James Version is 1,746 pages.

     If it were printed Breitbart estimates it would weigh 100 pounds.

     Concisely and perfectly stated. The pity of it is that Americans should need to learn this from an Australian. Well, at least she’s a brilliant Australian.

     Such a mountain of verbiage is a grand concealment mechanism for all the things that make for unfree trade: explicit provisions limiting this, forbidding that, and enabling an unbounded torrent of regulation according to what unelected bureaucrats deem “reasonable and proper.”

     Here’s a model for a true free trade agreement:

All laws that forbid, tax, limit or otherwise infringe upon trade between persons or organizations in the United States and persons or organizations in the nation of SomewhereElse are hereby repealed. All regulations founded upon any such law are nullified.

     But as Glenn Reynolds would say, that would offer insufficient opportunities for graft. So instead of free trade we have “free trade:” mammoth bills no Congressman or Senator has read that provide for essentially unlimited governmental interference in international trade, whether directly or by enabling subsequent regulation.

     In his classic work on management Up The Organization, Robert C. Townsend observes most pungently that complexity is the enemy of fairness. Complex rules are fertile ground for those adept at “playing the angles.” When the subject is legislation, complexity bestows an advantage on He Who Employs The Cleverest Lawyers. When complexity is combined with great volume, the winner will be the person or organization with the largest, best funded legal department – with a substantial discretionary fund for “entertainment,” of course – and woe betide anyone who seeks to compete with him.

     Keep that in mind as you review the fulminations of Establishmentarian figures and commentators who rail against Trump because he’s “against free trade.” And keep the overarching Townsendian observation in mind for when Congress is next asked to consider some gargantuan bill, hundreds or thousands of pages long, that purports to protect or promote freedom.

Treading On Trade

     A couple of doctrinaire libertarians have upbraided me for coming out against one of the articles of the libertarian faith: completely unrestricted free trade across national borders. So I thought I’d spend a few hundred words on the subject, in the interests of explaining my position.

     A cross-border trade can be either dyadic – a simple exchange between two trading partners – or complex – an exchange that partakes of interventions by other parties than the nominal traders. At this time, much cross-border trade is complex, in that it’s affected by intrusive governmental policies: typically tariffs, subsidies, or asymmetrical regulation. Much of the problem of job loss in America stems from such intrusions.

     If one is determined to omit consideration of the difference between dyadic and complex trades, there are many cases to be analyzed before arriving at a conclusion about the goodness or badness of “free trade.” However, the ultimate question is a simple one:

Is complex trade legitimate trade, or is it an exercise of governmental policies?

     My answer is that complex trade is not legitimately free trade. It’s a process whereby governments strain to acquire certain economic or fiscal advantages for themselves and/or for favored corporations or industries. In other words, it’s morally and practically indistinguishable from pre-Enlightenment mercantilism.

     William Hawkins and others have championed a return to mercantilism as the only truly “conservative” economic model. If one regards a government, an entity that gets what it seeks by exercises of coercion, as a legitimate player in the economy, this position is defensible...but I don’t hold that view. It’s my position that as soon as a government does anything to render trade complex, it ceases to be “free trade.” Therefore, measures taken in defense of one’s own economy become morally defensible.

     But what, then? Shall Americans be “deprived” of cheap foreign goods on the grounds that the actions of a government – whether ours or another – are rendering them cheaper than American-made equivalents? No. Rather, let the prices of those “cheaper” goods be raised by an import tariff until they’re roughly competitive, allowing for differences in quality, with the American equivalents. Then use the proceeds from that tariff to reduce domestic tax burdens. In effect, that would confiscate the proceeds from governmental interventions and redistribute them to the longsuffering American public.

     This was the original – one might even say “conservative” – means for financing the federal government. Remember that from 1866 to roughly the end of the Nineteenth Century, there was no income tax and no corporation tax. Yet the federal tax surplus was so large that Washington could find no way to spend it.

     I’m sure there will be nit-picking. The largest nit, of course, is that we could never hold Washington to such a policy. It would surely “absorb” the proceeds from the tariff in increased federal spending. As matters stand today, this charge is irrefutable.

     Thoughts, anyone? Politely, please. It’s not yet 7:00 AM and I’m already having a very bad day.

The Beauty of Excellence and Voluntarism

Drawing by the author, done in art school from a live model, c.1979

Greetings rebels to King George and curious others...

 

What is it that brings tears of Joy to your eyes? Is it finding out you bought a winning lottery ticket? Hearing a favorite piece of movie music? Reading about a pivotal moment in history?

It happened to me once again last night, while watching an ad on YouTube - for a Volvo truck, of all things - and today I decided to figure out why.

Not surprisingly I’d searched for that particular Volvo original short after watching something else: the so-called Chuck Norris parody of Jean Claude Van Damme’s truck stunt. The computer created Chuck-short featured a retro Ken-doll Norris, of course in a cowboy hat. His beard looked sprayed-on and his face was as smooth as a 15-year-old’s. Yes, it was laugh out loud clever.

Then I tracked down the Van Damme ad (linked above). And was mesmerized. And teared up, like I said.

And now, a day later, I’m absolutely convinced that it hasn’t been seen by 62 million people. Nope, I’m betting it’s more like 6.2 - 12.4 million and like me, they’ve watched it five-to-ten times each.

Mesmerized - from the opening seconds onwards - by the haunting music of Enya…

Held by the still appealing though undeniably weathered face and poignant voice-over from Van Damme…

Amazed by this one man’s steely calm and still-unflagging athleticism…and lastly…

Wowed by the sheer beauty of the rising sun gleaming off the twin Volvo machines which so ably co-star with a real-life action hero. For what courage it must take to attempt such a stunt!

So…to the more subtle difference between the Chuck Norris parody and this original, and what I believe makes the former a video that elicits a chuckle and a grin and Van Damme’s one that earns a joyful tearing up and a lasting inward glow.

Aside from the fact the Norris video is fake, it is dependent on a show of State Force, albeit force wrapped not in the proverbial velvet-glove, rather wrapped in Christmas lights and pretty signal flares. Sure “Norris” also straddles two mighty machines, which for all I know could be held aloft by Volvo engines. But these machines are war birds of some sort, painted grey or grey-blue (and is it just me or does the one whose nose we see look to be smiling?). The planes and the soldier-heroes this video’s splitting stunt man singlehandedly holds aloft are State-trained, then retained, and finally, dispatched by the State for one purpose only: to do harm to someone or something it has deemed its enemy. In other words, They Live to Destroy. Not only that, but they do all this by means of stolen property, tax-dollars taken at gunpoint, albeit implied-gunpoint, by your friends and mine, the I.R.S.

Now consider the real ad.

Think of how that one-minute and seventeen-seconds came to be and think of what it embodies.

It’s actually very simple. There were no threats, no real or implied force; just a boat load of FREE CHOICES. Men freely choosing to develop excellent skills…and then businesses bringing those skilled men together with the raw-materials upon which they could apply their skills.

Together voluntarily, cooperatively, Volvo and Van Damme worked to create an excellent synergistic Physical-plus-Performance “product.” Volvo engineers voluntarily traded their time to design and refine the machines Van Damme was then carried atop; Van Damme himself voluntarily used his physical being; traded his time to train hard - not merely for this stunt, but to maintain his fitness over all these years - and then he voluntarily got up and stood on those magnificent truck’s mirrors, and was driven flawlessly - backwards and timed to perfection - into the sunrise.

Freedom to create Excellence. What could be more beautiful or more joyful?

Until next time, Keep Rebelling and keep creating, in whatever medium YOUR talents and skills are most excellently utilized!