With fertilizer prices spiking due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a majority of American farmers now say they will have a hard time securing their needed supply this year, and President Donald Trump says he is “watching fertilizer prices” closely to prevent price gouging.
But if the president is worried about high fertilizer prices, he might want to have a conversation with his top trade official.
Before joining the Trump administration last year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer lobbied for policies that limited fertilizer imports and drove up prices for American farmers. Greer represented the J.R. Simplot Company as it successfully persuaded the first Trump administration to impose higher tariffs on fertilizer—despite the opposition from farmers and agricultural interests, who warned that those tariffs would create higher prices and potential shortages.
That part of Greer’s career is not a secret. He testified in front of the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in favor of those tariffs and later represented Simplot in court as it fended off challenges to them.
Many of the world’s poorest countries threw off colonialism in the mid-20th century only to replace it with variants of socialism. They have high barriers to cross-border trade and capital flows, state-owned enterprises, stifling regulations and corrupting favoritism, all based on the idea that government knows best how to make people rich. In truth, the only people who get rich are the governments and their cronies.
“The most effective economic development assistance is mutually beneficial and profitable trade partnerships between the private sectors of countries,” the declaration of principles says. That’s correct, and the tariff-friendly administration could benefit from listening to its own advice.
The principles the U.S. wants other countries to adopt go both ways. Blaming foreign trade or immigrants for economic problems is shirking America’s responsibility for its own economic development. Taxing imports makes it harder to develop the mutually beneficial relationships that the U.S. says it wants.
Poverty doesn’t go away by transferring money from the people who have it to the people who don’t. That’s true between countries, and it’s true within countries. “Trade over aid” is a message the U.S. government should feel confident expounding to domestic audiences as well as international ones.
The postliberals argue that—whatever public opinion says—the worldly authority of government is inherently subordinate to the spiritual authority of the Church, seeking to return us to the time when medieval popes asserted their authority over kings (indeed, some prominent postliberals have even fantasized about a bizarre scenario where the Pope appoints Melania Trump as a Queen of America). There wasn’t any polling from that time, but I’d expect attitudes were different toward this sort of thing.
But beyond public opinion, what’s damning for the postliberal Integralist theorists is that the Catholic Church wants nothing to do with them!
Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Pope’s Nuncio to the United States, recently published a scathing assessment of postliberal political doctrine, characterizing it as a far-right counterpart to the “wokeism” of the far-left.
Steve Patterson’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is superb:
Mark L. Clifford and L. Gordon Crovitz put it perfectly in their op-ed about the confiscation of Jimmy Lai’s assets (“Now China Is Taking Jimmy Lai’s Property,” April 17): “Businesses know better than to invest in a place where private assets are seized on the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.”
They’re right that “Hong Kong’s seizure of Mr. Lai’s assets is a warning to other companies.” First China arrested him and took his freedom. Now it’s his assets. Mr. Lai risked much and made much.
And how is it less of a pointed message to businesses and entrepreneurs when U.S. states do the same thing and call it a wealth tax?
California and New York, are you listening?
Although I believe that Deirdre McCloskey pushes her case against the importance of institutions a bit too far, there nevertheless remains much important truth in her insistence – such as is expressed in this new essay of hers – that the dominant social force is ideas (and the way people talk and write about ideas). One flaw of most neo-institutionalists is indeed, as Deirdre notes, to give excessive credit to consciously designed legislation imposed by a central authority.
My colleague Bryan Caplan is betting that AI will not doom humanity to extinction.
Let’s hope that the courts overturn Virginia’s obnoxious new gerrymandered map.
