Scott Lincicome understandably wonders if Trump’s “reciprocal trade” goes in only one direction. A slice:
First, does this mean that the US government will reduce tariffs on imports from the many countries that have lower tariffs than we have? As Figures 1 and 2 show for trade in manufactured goods and other non-agricultural goods, the United States does not have the lowest tariffs in the world and instead ranks somewhere in the middle among wealthy, industrialized countries. (Tellingly, only really poor countries have very high tariffs, but that’s a discussion for another time.) Should Trump’s system be based on average tariff rates, then “true” reciprocity would require US tariff rate reductions on goods from dozens of countries.
Williamson Evers is correct: “The ugly comeback of tariffs demands a muscular rebuttal.”
Elon Musk and the White House are moving fast to shrink the bureaucracy, or at least the easy targets. But maybe they should pay more attention to the administrative state that grinds ahead with the Biden agenda. Consider the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit last week seeking to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.
Biden Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter reviewed the deal but didn’t pull the trigger before leaving. So why is the Trump Administration going ahead? Hard to figure. The tie-up would create a stronger competitor to Cisco in the wireless business networking market. Cisco boasts a roughly 50% share while HPE has about 17% and Juniper has 7%.
It would also give business customers a complete stack of technologies, including networking, router switching, storage and AI systems that no company besides China’s Huawei offers. Huawei is banned in the U.S. for national security reasons. Many businesses prefer to use one company for all technology solutions.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission also continues to defend its overreaching Consolidated Audit Trail system before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The system would let the SEC collect personal information on everyone who invests in the stock market under the pretext of preventing manipulation.
Acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda has likened the rule to “a dystopian surveillance state, not the shining beacon for liberty and the free world.” So why is the SEC still defending it? Elon Musk’s frantic rush around Washington is attention-grabbing and may do some good, but more attention to the grinding details of government would be welcome.
With his usual sensitivity, President Trump blamed last month’s deadly crash on diversity mandates although the investigation had barely started. But presidential cognition remains intact. Mr. Trump apparently recalls that, in his first presidency, he halted an Obama innovation to screen out applicants for air traffic control jobs who might be white. Unbelievably, job seekers scored less well on the Obama test if they admitted to enjoying math and science.
Only so much, though, can be accomplished with Mr. Trump’s campaign against racial preferences. Many other maladies of public administration also operate against meritocracy. When schools are run for the benefit of teachers union members, they aren’t run for the benefit of students. Diversity and inclusion policies at the Central Intelligence Agency, a book by former agent John Gentry argues, aimed at filling the ranks with Obama supporters, who later gave us the collusion hoax.
Two trillion dollars in annual savings was the goal bruited by Elon Musk for his DOGE task force. Unrealistic as an aim, it isn’t unrealistic as an estimate of how much money goes out the door without producing any real value for taxpayers. A large, opaque, unaccountable and practically unsupervisable process for disposing of $6.75 trillion inevitably is going to produce many outcomes indistinguishable from setting piles of money on fire.
Almost alone the U.S. air traffic system remains captive to such a logrolling cycle, chronically understaffed, outfitted with ancient technology, even as Congress imposes more and more traffic requirements at federally run Washington National because members (in the words of the Washington Post) are “eager for a direct flight from their district to the airport closest to D.C.”
Matt Zwolinski isn’t impressed with Joseph Stiglitz’s latest book. A slice:
So it’s really too bad that there’s just so much silliness in here. Stiglitz takes himself to be arguing against the likes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Which is fine, except, he never actually argues against Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. It’s all just one gigantic exercise in strawmanning. In Stiglitz’s world, figures on “The Right” have literally nothing useful to say about political or economic matters, and no arguments or evidence to fall back on in support of their views. At one point, he tells a story about a conversation he had with Friedman during a seminar. I’m going from memory here, but the gist of it was something like this:
Milton Friedman: Completely unregulated markets solve all human problems! Automatically! Every time!
Joe Stiglitz: A-hah, but I have discovered something that has clearly never occurred to you – I call it, MARKET FAILURE!
Milton Friedman: (Collapses in a puddle of drool on the floor)Free market economists, on Stiglitz’s view, assume that markets are perfectly efficient. People like Hayek assume that there is perfect information (No really he actually says this). And so all it takes to undermine their view is pointing out that these conditions clearly aren’t met in the real world. And one must conclude that people like Friedman and Hayek are either complete blockheads or dishonest shills for the capitalist ruling class.
