… if he is an American conservative, is sure that, while his own government’s intervention into the American economy will be stupid, bungling, inept, corrupt, wasteful, and generally harmful to the American economy, is equally sure that foreign-governments’ interventions into their economies are so ingenious, masterful, well-honed, competent, efficient, and generally hyper-effective that these interventions turn all firms and workers in those foreign economies into amazingly efficient and stupendously productive machines for producing so much output that, unless Uncle Sam obstructs the ‘flooding’ into America of these oceans of foreign output, Americans will soon become third-world denizens forever without jobs, hope, and ‘greatness.’ This conservative American protectionist’s mysterious confidence in the economic-planning powers of foreign governments is stronger the closer foreign governments are to totalitarian dictatorships lording it over populations that have long been impoverished by communism.
This conservative American protectionist then – also mysteriously – trusts Uncle Sam to intervene into the U.S. economy if and only insofar as that intervention is aimed at obstructing fellow Americans’ access to the miraculous cornucopia of economic goodies that highly interventionist foreign governments alone are able to engineer through their devious schemes of impoverishing us Americans by compelling their own peoples to shower us with endless gifts of attractive goods and services.
