Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) rightly calls out J.D. Vance for glorifying government slaughter of people not convicted of any crime: (HT Phil Magness)
Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the “highest and best use of the military.”
Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?
Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??
What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.
Lai lost his freedom, his now-shuttered newspaper and much of his fortune for protesting China’s crackdown on Hong Kong and for defending democracy and human rights. He was charged with two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of collusion under Hong Kong’s relatively recent national security law for publishing pro-democracy views. He also was charged with sedition under a law passed when Hong Kong was still under British rule that originally was used to silence critics of colonialism.
Fareed Zakaria explains that Trump’s tariffs are strengthening foreign alliances against the United States. Three slices:
What was surprising were the images from the days before, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization hosted leaders from India, Turkey, Vietnam and Egypt, among others. All these regional powers were generally considered closer to Washington than Beijing. But a toxic combination of tariffs, hostile rhetoric and ideological demands is moving many of the world’s pivotal states away from the United States and toward China. It might be the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.
…..
The governments and people in these countries are outraged at their treatment. India used to be overwhelmingly pro-American. Now it is rapidly shifting toward a deep suspicion of Washington. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s sagging poll numbers have risen as he stands up to Trump’s bullying. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa gained stature when he politely responded to Trump’s Oval Office hectoring. It is worth remembering that other countries have nationalist sentiment, too!
…..
While Washington has been alienating these countries, China has been courting them. It has outlined a plan with Brazil for a transformative railway network connecting its Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific one. Xi managed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China for the first time in seven years. China has courted South Africa with trade and aid, and public sentiment in that country has moved to be quite favorably inclined toward Beijing.
Pierre Lemieux continues to write wisely about trade and industrial policy. A slice:
In passing, let’s note that in the roaring ’60s, it was popular among the ruling establishments of underdeveloped countries, supported by the Western intelligentsia, to impose large tariffs on foreign manufactured goods in order to help domestic manufacturing. Only when, a few decades later, it was realized that such an industrial policy was a fool’s errand, were the poor people of underdeveloped countries able to jump on the bandwagon of free trade and to escape dire poverty.
A basic economic reason why “unfairly traded steel” or the underlying ideal of mercantilist and industrial policy is a fool’s errand is that it presupposes a central economic planner possessing what he does not and cannot possess, that is, the information of time, place, costs, and preferences that is carried by prices determined by supply and demand on free markets. Friedrich Hayek explained that in the 1930s and 1940s (see Hayek’s American Economic Review article “The Use of Knowledge in Society”). A central planner cannot even know many intricate effects of his resource-allocation decisions, especially in a complex economy. Thus, government intervention begets government intervention in the greatest political disorder. That the US government only realized after imposing steel tariffs that they should be imposed on steel products too provides a rather funny illustration.
Another important lesson from protectionism—empirically confirmed a thousand times—is how rent-seeking special interests will try to exploit the general public, or part of it, each time the state offers them a means to do so. The requests for tariffs on steel-containing products are already flooding the government.
Alex Cole tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
64% of Arkansas farmers voted for Trump, at the present rate because of tariffs, one third of them will be bankrupt by this time next year. Their solution? They want money from the government. So again, it’s not socialism when I get money, just when everybody else gets it…
Brian Albrecht asks if tariffs will cause an outbreak of “greedflation.”
Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talks with Richard Dawkins about science.
