So here we are.
This is the choice we’re given this year:
An egomaniacal New York Democrat who represents the terrible nexus between powerful moneyed interests and overbearing governmental influence in our lives.
A candidate whose entire family’s wealth in fact is a direct result of underhanded, criminal at times, manipulation of power that puts the ‘little guy’ under the thumb of those in undeserved positions of power and authority.
A candidate with actual legal travails in fact hanging like the Sword of Damocles as we move into the general election season.
A staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood, universal healthcare, and the expansion of governmental power, with a blindly protectionist view of free trade, who (although a supporter of it at the time) contends that George W Bush lied us into war in Iraq.
A candidate who cozies up to (and profits from relationships with) foreign strongmen.
A candidate who expresses an excitement and yearning desire to gut the First Amendment, primarily with the goal of targeting political enemies.
A candidate who colluded with party leaders to squelch any expression of inner-party dissent and explicitly and in the most personal and insulting ways conceivable to deny fellow-party adversaries any legitimacy even if it meant dragging them through the mud.
A candidate who chooses to offset such obvious personal (and universally accepted) flaws with a boring and milquetoast running mate with the hopes the general electorate will not take notice of such clear unfitness for the job.
A crooked, deceitful, duplicitous lout with an unquenchable desire for power and a seemingly physical inability to tell the truth.
The most unliked major-party nominee for president in the history of the United States.
So what, then? Are we supposed to vote for his opponent instead?
-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)
Very cleverly worded. 🙂
In the sleaze department, I think HRC is much sleazier than Trump.
As far as the Iraq war – Trump, like many others (me, for example) also supported the wars in A-stan and Iraq – based on what we were told. The thing here is that our opinions sent no one to their death and cost nothing. There’s no point in litigating it once again – for all I know, the info the pols had really did justify the wars.
I would like to think that our pols learned something from A-stan (which did turn into the quagmire we were warned about) and Iraq. BHO’s/HRC’s further adventures in the ME tells me that few lessons have been learned.
People like Trump don’t get wealthy by being nice but at least most of his wealth was earned selling people what they are willing to pay for. His rent-seeking is noteworthy but hardly rare in today’s economy.
HRC, on the other hand, hasn’t earned an honest wage since she worked in the tuna canning factory back in the 60s.
Bill and Hill obtained Trumpian levels of wealth peddling influence and access to the highest level of the gov’t.
Trump is a high-risk candidate although I think he won’t have a lot of effect on the DC culture – it’s too big and entrenched. Reagan didn’t have all that much success taming the beast – and the beast was smaller and less invasive than it is now. But there is some chance that Trump may have a few small successes.
Hillary is a low-risk candidate: she would be awful… little risk of anything else. She and her cronies and fellow travelers are committed to doing harm and there’s a near-zero chance the DC GOP will serve as anything more than a small speed bump. As usual.
So your preferred candidate lost, get over it. Trump was not my first choice either but the alternative is infinitely worse.
As one who values the 2nd amendment, the Democrats would like nothing better than to turn the entire country into the California model or worse. That leaves me with little choice but to vote for Trump in November. (Writing this with my Beretta 92 on my hip.)
I hope you’ll come around to at least working to defeat the Hildabeast in Nov.
And if you say you’ll vote for Gary Johnson, well at least that is one vote the Hillary won’t get, but he is just too loony for my taste. Even with my libertarian leanings.
Yes, Trump got down in the mud. But at least he did it himself, unlike Cruz, who claimed to take the moral high ground and said nothing when people in his organization and PACs supporting him attacked other candidates- at least until that final outburst when it was clear he wasn’t going to get the delegates needed to seriously compete. Remember, Cruz was the one who declared spouses open season when he said nothing about the ad attacking Melania. Trump was responding in kind. Honestly, Trump did us a favor by exposing Cruz as the conniving hypocrite that he is.
Sigh. I hate what Trump support does to people. I truly do.
Does anyone who saw Cruz get booed off the stage still think he could have beaten Hillary?
TRUMP managed to beat jews in the NYC real estate game. During the campaign he clearly stated he had to pay off politicians on both sides to keep them from sabotaging him. Is that dirty yes, but that’s NYC. TRUMPS fortune depends on average people being able to splurge at his properties. Want to get married on a TRUMP golf course, it will cost as much as a cheap new car.
Once TRUMP won the nomination the deal to support the nominee they forced him to sign applied to everyone else. All the zeros running were to support Jeb.
“boring & milquetoast running make”- Have you seen Hillary’s Cane?
As far as Pence being milquetoast, he tried to push a bill that would have had hospitals contacting ICE when they had an illegal alien for deportation. That would have been far preferable than having 2 men use ambulances as taxis 1363 times in one year as Fresno had. http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002307983
Whether we like it or not, whether we wish we had a third choice (which we do not), it is either Trump or Clinton. Maybe the question to ask is: which one is more likely to do extreme and perhaps irremediable damage to the governing process and our rights and our genuine national interests. Yes, the lesser of two evils is still evil, but we don’t have a choice between good and evil … to be honest, I don’t believe politics of any sort can ever produce such a clear-cut choice. We have a choice between Trump and Clinton. “Choose the form of your Destructor”, to paraphrase if not quote “Ghostbusters”. We can survive Trump and, if necessary, he can be impeached from office. Clinton? No known political process is capable of removing her from office. Nor any legal process, for that matter. Choose and be damned, either way. Welcome to real life.
What, pray tell, does Trump support do to people, V?
@4 – VtK: what supporting Trump does to people? Perhaps it was pre-Trump culture and politics that did it to people. People who don’t feel alienated aren’t attracted to Trumps and Sanders.
Trump’s the nominee and barring any sort of Category 5 scandal, I will vote for him. The option is Hillary and I really do believe that the country won’t be salvageable after she and the Dems are done with it.
Pessimist that I am, there may be no politician capable of salvaging the country. Per Pogo, we have seen the problem and the problem is us.
Back when Donald Trump was donating tens of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and other Democrats… Ted Cruz was defending the Constitution in front of the Supreme Court.
But now… because Ted Cruz stopped short of kissing the ring of the guy who said his dad plugged JFK and repeatedly, viciously, personally insulted his wife… I’m supposed to think he’s a traitor, a scoundrel, a shifty sleazy politician.
That’s what supporting Trump does to people.
I’ll have no part of it.
@ KCRob: Precisely my thoughts. I’ve been following politics for over a decade now. It feels like, in that time, conservatism has been losing steam over that time. Conservatives have been having to rely on whatever bones Democrats see fit to throw them, and favorable Supreme Court decisions, which have been few and far between in recent years. Honestly, what was the last Supreme Court decision that conservatives were happy about? Otherwise, conservatives have been playing stop-gap and seem almost embarrassed to stand by their principles.
Perhaps down-on-their luck Americans don’t want to associate with a movement whose members are constantly bowled over in the political arena, who scramble to die on every hill the Democrats invite them too over issues that many Americans don’t really care about. Defending the sanctity of marriage is all well and good, but is constitutionally defining marriage as between one man and one woman going to help people in the Rust Belt and Coal Country who are suffering from a stagnant economy?
And another thing: how has the conservatives’ turning of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” message into mustache twirling Social Darwinism towards constituencies who have gone differ from the way Democrats castigate members of their voting blocs who leave the reservation?
I don’t know what precisely what happened to the conservative movement in America. Maybe I drifted towards the center. Maybe it drifted further to the right. Maybe a combination of both. But I find it hard to believe that conservatives are pure and spotless victims in this whole thing. If people like what you’re selling, they’ll buy it. And if they don’t like it, they won’t buy it. So maybe instead of sitting around calling the American people too stupid to understand what’s being offered to them, maybe conservatives need to ask themselves if something’s wrong with the product, and not the potential customers.
What happened to conservatism is that a generation of Republican politicians (including two presidents) paid lip-service to conservatism while pursuing Big Government Progressive policy agendas. I honestly don’t know where conservatism goes from here; with no party, no champion, and no path forward.
@ V the K: So conservatism’s decline is entirely the fault of people who were not within the movement… kissing up to people within the movement? That still implies blame on the part of the movement.
And besides, it isn’t like conservatives have been shown up as hypocrites- how many conservative politicians who have taken a stand against pornography and homosexuality have been found indulging in those activities?- or supported pseudoscientific positions that have been debunked for decades, if not centuries- women who get pregnant from rape actually consented, the burial tombs of the Pharaohs were actually grain silos, etc.; and chosen the stupidest hills to die on: who gives a crap if people are getting high legally when the economy is in tatters and the borders is as porous as cheese cloth?
As to where conservatism is going: your options are to form your own minor party and spiral down into ever greater levels of ideological insanity a la the Libertarians… or realize that every movement since the dawn of time has had a shelf-life, and that your repeated failure to get a conservative nominee into the White House since over thirty years ago was a sign that conservatism might be coming up on, if not past, its expiration date. “Evolve or die” is Nature’s Great Commandment, and it applies to all areas of life and human society. Perhaps the fact that so many conservatives reject that law’s existence is part of your problem?
At its core, what distinguishes conservatism from progressivism is that conservatism believes in embracing what has been historically proven to work and rejecting what has been historically proven to fail. Progressivism is the opposite.
Conservatism may be “out” in terms of political popularity. That does not matter, at least not to me. I will remain a conservative and embrace what has been proven to work and reject what has been proven to fail, even if 51% or more of the country is the other way.
Now, either conservatives are right, and eventually history and economics will assert themselves over the USA as they have over every other empire humankind has ever built; Or, the leftists are right and all the rules of history and laws of economics don’t matter as long as gay couples can get married and trannies can use whatever bathroom they feel like.
We will see how this plays out.
@ V the K: Indeed we shall watch. Though your comment about the Right and Left seems to reveal an dichotomy in your mind about conservatism and liberalism: that conservatism is a movement that accepts economic reality, but is incapable of accommodating social change; whereas liberalism is a movement that has the opposite problem. What’s stopping the emergence of a movement that accepts both economic reality and social change?
That depends on what you mean by “social change.” If “social change” means rejecting the family as the basic building block of society per the left, then any such movement would be flawed from the beginning.
But you otherwise raise a question I have asked before, why are Republicans forever pressured to accept “social change” but Democrats are never likewise pressured to accommodate economic reality? If you can answer that, perhaps you can answer why a movement that professes both economic realism and social dynamism… the Libertarians, for example… has such a limited appeal.
@ V the K: The Left has been able to force the Right to constantly accept social change because they wormed themselves into teaching positions and positions of influence in Hollywood and the media. Politics is downstream of culture, and conservatives failed to appreciate that: the reason why Hollywood is so filled with liberals is because they realized the importance of culture-producers to influencing politics, whereas conservatives rejected jobs in the arts as “acceptable” or “real” career options.
As to the Libertarians: they confess both economic realism and social dynamism, but refuse to understand that no movement is going to get its way on everything, or even should; economic realism and social dynamism be damned, nobody wants to associate with the political party whose delegates boo the guy who says that selling crack to kindergarteners ought to be illegal. I had more than a few friends who switched their party from Republican to Libertarian, and then went independent following the catastrophe of the Libertarian National Convention; and now many of them intend to vote for Trump.
As for Cruz, I never really warmed up to him. He opposed many boneheaded and tyrannical liberal gambits, yes, but I had no desire to see him get into the White House; I knew about Goldman-Sachs giving financial aid to his senate campaign before the primary process began, and when the primaries began, I disliked his attempts to conceal that and paint himself as a working-class hero. If one gives Hillary and Trump a black mark for their corporate ties, that same black mark needs to be given to Ted Cruz. Of all the candidates, only Jeb! and Kasich had less appeal to me.
VtK: I cast my KS caucus ballot for Cruz – it wasn’t easy because he is not a likable candidate. But being likable is not a prime qualification. The intense dislike that GOPe has for him is a plus in my book.
I believe that conservative principles are the correct ones… as Mrs Thatcher once said, the facts of life are conservative. I don’t think conservatism has been abandoned; I think conservatism’s messengers are being abandoned. Too many of the messengers don’t actually believe what they’re saying while others spend a lot of political capital on lost causes.
This isn’t about Trump being a dick to Ted Cruz. This is about Trump’s lack of honor and basic decency. Others may be able to put that aside, if only because Hillary is an order of magnitude worse. I cannot.
Its no longer right vs left but America Frist vs Globalism.
“8.What, pray tell, does Trump support do to people, V?”
It made MILO have 8 boyfriends, be carried around on a chair, and kiss a bearded hipster.
V_K look up Cruz’s GoldManSacks Council on Foreign Relations wife before you white knight her. TRUMP let Cruz speak and gave him enough rope to hang his career with. If Cruz didn’t want to support him he could have been cheering HilLIARy on with Jeb’s (((financers))) away from the RNC. Cruz is a sigma personality with some gamma traits he couldn’t have won but he would make a good judge.
Trump Gaye out Lindsey Grams phone number because he had to donate to both sides to keep them from sabotaging. Even as far back as 86 there is a video of him telling politicians to not sell real estate for a nickel on the dollar because it would lead to people like him and Buffet being the only players in the game.
What matters is our border, liberals are not reproducing so they have been trying to import so much of the 3rd world they will always have power as the party of free stuff & super-delegates that ignore the people. Ann Coulter said as long as he builds the wall and does Operation Wetback II, she doesn’t care if he performs abortions in the oval office.
“I don’t know what precisely what happened to the conservative movement in America”
A bunch of liberals who wanted to profit off of war left the left and became the well funded Neo-cons, while still being socially left.
Here is TRUMP being decent & classy when Dr Carson didn’t hear his name called. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soVFOYTVaMk
Ex army libertarian blogspot has come around to the notion that libertarianism will only work in a nation that is at least 90% libertarian. http://ex-army.blogspot.my/
An even better view by ex libertarian John C Wright.
Libertarianism says my neighbors do me no wrong by exposing my children to child pornography, provided only force or fraud is not used. There is no public and objective standard of decency, honesty, prudence, and justice present in the libertarian theory: but a libertarian commonwealth could not stand were its children not trained from infancy to be decent, honest, prudent and just. It is, in short, a self-eliminating theory. It is a theory for bachelors…
In other words, the state cannot remain neutral between the Church and the Left because the Left will not allow it. As a practical matter, libertarianism is unilateral disarmament in the culture war.
Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/05/07/politics/why-im-no-longer-libertarian/#ixzz4FHp7IuXb
Trump support seems to lobotomize it’s sufferers. People who hated the Trump didn’t seem to submit just to his inevitability, but bought into it lock, stock, and barrel (items Trump hates btw). People, who could name in moments a dozen reasons Trump should not be the candidate, now sing hosannas about his greatness, while laughing at his blovations and malicious attacks on Cruz, his wife, and his father, and defend these like your typical leftoid voter defends 0bama’s constant failures. Imagine if Trump wasn’t in the race, and it had been MSNBC telling these lies and Tinglles Matthews belittling Mrs. Cruz instead. These same people would have been readying the tar, feathers, and candles whilst looking for the nearest lamppost or sturdy tree. By the way, felling your own tingles up your legs?
If he wins, enjoy your justice appointments. He’d like to appoint his sister to SCOTUS, but sees it would be a massive conflict of interest. But that is the kind of judge he likes.
She is left of Kagin on a lot of things, by the by. She makes Kennedy look like a rock hard conservative.
He wants to fix 0bamacare by giving us Canadian style NHS care. What does he care? He gets top notch free care if he wins, and if he doesn’t, can afford to fly to somewhere else for treatment. I see he tap danced around that issue after gaining traction on others.
All his newfound conservative values he supposedly now has. He held how many two years ago? A year? The beginning of the race? hell 4 or 5 months ago on some of them, he held the opposite. But you folks wanted to hear him claim them, so he did . . . how fast does he revert to his former position once in office?
So, he’s your man. Great. He ain’t Hillary, you say?
Neither is Bernie Sanders, doesn’t mean I want him in the Office.
Trump, Hillary, or the idiot Johnson.
some fecking choice.
I’d almost prefer Christie or Jeb!
Maybe not Christie,
And Jeb! would need to make the exclamation point his last name instead of Bush.
Steve,
I am about as libertarian as can be personally (okay, maybe it is apathy), but I know it one thing in common with communism . . . it cannot work once in contact with the real world. A 90% libertarian country is not enough, it would need to be a 90% libertarian World, and one would need to keep a close eye on the 10% to keep it that way.
But, we need to get closer to that kind of world than we are right now, imho.
You guys who hate Cruz because of the Goldman-Sachs connection are aware that Trump hired a Goldman-Sachs partner as a top campaign adviser, yes?
@ V the K: Your tu quoque fallacy is showing.
In this case, I don’t see how it’s a tu quoque. We’re supposed to think Ted Cruz is the devil incarnate because his wife works for Goldman-Sachs. Why is it okay, then, for Trump to have a Goldman-Sachs partner as a top campaign adviser?
See, it’s not a ‘tu quoque’ because I’m not defending the connection by pointing out that Trump has the same connection, and I’m not the one taking the position that having a connection to GS makes you unfit to be president. That’s the position of the Cruz-hating Trump supporters. I’m asking how people can take that position and justify it with any logical consistency? Is it okay because, “Well, it’s Trump, and he’s gonna make American great again.” If you’re holding Trump to a different standard, then admit it.
I never said I had a problem with candidates having an association with GS employees, V, kindly don’t put words in my mouth. I was objecting to Cruz getting bankrolled by GS. If Trump has received money from GS during this campaign, kindly enlighten me.
The Goldman Sachs partner was hired as the Finance Chairman of the Trump campaign.
Game. Setc. Match.
I knew he was hired, V. I was asking if Goldman-Sachs gave Trump any money, not Trump giving Goldman-Sachs money. My stated objection was candidates receiving money money.
So, no, sorry, try again.
As Gay Patriot is well aware, I am voting for Johnson. He is far from perfect as he is too isolationist and way too pro immigration (let them all in is his motto). But overall, he is good on domestic policy, and he is the least evil of the three. Unless you want to count Jill Stein, the Communist from the Green Party.
The social circles of the Trump families and the Clintons i.e. Chelsea and Ivanka, have more sway on how government is morphed into tools, repositories and even major commercial endeavors, than we as a country will ever know. Most elected officials can retire into a comfy consultant / lobbyist position.
Just as certain neighborhoods with special zoning considerations and happy negotiations happen on golf courses, shooting hoops or just a private weekend at the vacation or retreat home either on Martha’s V, or Kennebunkport, or the San
Juans . . .
There is a reason two well connected investors. . .who are the two girls married to?
Follow the money.
Now Hannity and other right wing talk show hosts are concurring with Trump about gutting free trade and going protectionist. Why are some conservatives abandoning principles to sniff the butthole of the egotistical Trump?
I understand dislike of TRUMP?, we didn’t have Mr.Perfect, Republicans never do.As much as I admired Ted Cruz and many,but not all of his positions , everyone who I know who was not a Evangelical Christian thought he was a creep. Although they couldn’t explain why, I personally think it was they thought he would outlaw the sex they wish they could have. It is Thaddeus Russell versus David Barton and the Thaddeus Russell people won. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for then vote against Hillary!!!, like Pat Condell of the U.K.( He has a YouTube video called ” I vote against you “)
You are correct. The ONLY solution is a Convention of States, per Article 5 of the Constitution. Washington will not fix itself; it’s up to those of us want a constitutional government back to use the power of our STATES to force the needed changes. Look into it! I’m a member of the movement in my state, and I recommend you all join the movement where you live. It’s the only way.
Back at the beginning of this cycle, I stated what I thought was obvious: “Trump is a force to be reckoned with.” Now I learn that even now, people go straight at Trump with a cleaver and totally, completely ignore the “force” that Trump has awakened, cultivated, used extremely effectively to set the politics of this nation on a path of rebellion.
Waste your time, if you will, at throwing brickbats at The Donald. But take time to review the French Revolution. The “force” is not so much dedicated to the leader as it is to the “idea whose time has come.”
Back in 2008, the TEA Party was a spontaneous eruption of common concern. It collapsed when the professional political whores started scrapping among themselves as to who was the fairest prima donna of them all. It is ever thus, the movement is hi-jacked by those who would be king and the sorry villagers are left holding their torches and pitchforks.
Well, Trump has proven to be the charismatic who could knit our discontent into a mantle of power and achieve the nomination of a political party. Hells bells and peanut butter, what does it matter if he is a blue collar DemonizingRat or a prodigal, opportunistic Repugnant or, like Bernie Sanders, an opportunist who has used a process?
“On his July 22, 2016 show, Rush Limbaugh succinctly stated:
And the response of way too many purists among the Republican flock was to criticize The Donald for being, well, coarse. Not worthy of the country club.
“The Die is cast.” Trump “crossed the Rubicon” in his acceptance speech. He is going after Hillary and the DemonizingRats with a vengeance. He has reintroduced the meaning of Genghis Khan’s rebuke: “I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
Conservative Puritans like Jonah Goldberg find the Trump force to be out of sync with the Jonah Goldberg version of reality. The nemeses of the Goldberg view are those insignificant, backward facing small Americans who want protected borders, law and order, public servants, controlled immigration, Constitutional order and process, production of goods, not just services and military strength.
People quibble over how to “accurately” define fascist or socialist or capitalism or justice or fair. So why should it be any surprise that there is a wide array of stompy boots for pissing and moaning over what is a “true” conservative and which “principles” get a line of their own and in what order they are aligned in the great “Conservative Manifesto.”
The Donald has come. He is walking among us. Whatever it is that sets your stomach on edge, best you examine it and your stomach, because “the force” which is The Donald is not listening. Take your cue from Reince Priebus. He sees it the way Rush sees it. The Donald is the nominee and the ONLY other choice is Hillary. Laura Ingraham pointed into the lens and told the losers of the nomination: “even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos––and we love you, we love you––but you must honor your pledge to support Donald Trump now! Tonight! Tonight!”
Naturally, no one at GayPatriot made any such sort of pledge and every one is perfectly within his rights to say why he won’t support Trump and to urge others to follow his lead.
Calling, once again, on Rush: “… I’m here to tell you that we cannot even compete with the Democrats when it comes to scaring people. It is their stock-in-trade. It is in their ‘how-to’ manual to acquire power. They frighten their own voters and as many people in this country as often as they can, and they ratchet it down, they double down and they triple down on it, irrationally so.”
For the first time in forever, The Donald is taking it to the Democrats, up close and personal. That is “the force” to be reckoned with. The Donald is now saying: “It’s the economy, stupid!” The Donald is now saying that baking wedding cakes for gays is small stuff compared to keeping gays safe from mutilation and murder by Radical Islamists.
If you have not read to this point, you will have missed this disclaimer: I think The Donald’s temperament is at least questionable. His narcissism is closer to Obama’s than that of Pence. He readily fires his problems and therefore may be subject to caprice. I thoroughly dislike his self-satisfied smile and his hair concoction. I wonder if Melania is hermetically sealed in a glass box each evening. When The Donald goes “off” I always expect a train wreck to follow. But, hey, The Donald is the closest thing to St. George taking on the bureaucracy dragon we have had in our lifetimes. Obama doubled the national debt in his short tenure. If The Donald can cut it by just 10% it will be a miracle we have never experienced.
I stand 1,000% with the people of the “force” and I hope and pray The Donald will deliver some measure of progress in restoring the basic blueprint laid out in the Constitution. I know damned well that Hillary will only dig us deeper and deeper into the hole we are in.
One final thought: perhaps The Donald really will put Pence in as the Chief Operating Officer. Perhaps The Donald will put his brand of “Czar” in with each Cabinet officer to strategize how to reorganize the bureaucracy in ways that the Cabinet officer is kept from accomplishing due to regulations. Perhaps The Donald will “go rogue” and short sheet the globalists and State Department obstructionists. Perhaps The Donald will re-invent the Executive Office of the President. With one day to go in 2015, The Hill reported that the federal government’s rules, proposed rules and notices amounted to 81,611 pages for the year so far — compared to 77,687 pages in 2014 and the all-time high of 81,405 pages in 2010. Perhaps The Donald will stick a sword in this process of ruling by fiat by the Executive Branch which makes a mockery of Article One of the Constitution. Once again, you can be damned certain Hillary will stretch every loophole and every form of quackery like the Executive Order and Executive Memoradum. What bothers many, and rightfully so, is whether The Donald will use the same trickery as a supposed “force for good.” Only time will tell. But I, for one, place higher value in The Donald’s chance to make America Great again than I put in having him tried for witchcraft and heresy and burned at the stake by angry Inquisitors and Puritans.
Davinci38 @ #33:
Am is missing the page of “principles” which details “free trade” and “protectionism”?
I understand how “free trade” can be semi-controlled by alliances. But who controls the alliances? The U.N. or the multi-national colonialists who invented the Banana Republic? Or, perhaps, the Clinton Global Initiative and George Soros. So long as the principles are laid down and policed by unprincipled extra-govermental players, what should we expect? Terrorism, paramilitary rule, criminal entities, multinational conglomerates, dictatorships, oligarchies, cartels, monopolies, syndicates and thuggery.
@33 – davinci38 Off topic a bit but my take on “free trade” is that it’s a policy option. Too many on the right see it as religion with few/no deviation allowed.
Free trade has downsides – some of them “yuge”. Free, and free-ish trade should be the preferred policy but the downsides have to be considered.
For the techy-types, I watched a tear-down video of an HP-85 desktop computer the other day. The ’85 came out around 1980 and was an impressive device. I used one to control an automated test station for some telecom equipment back then. The striking part of the video is all the “Made in USA” labels inside the thing. In the day, the insides of HP equipment were works of art and the ’85 was no exception. Yes, it has some imported parts but the level of domestic sourcing is unheard of now. It’s weird.
Lots of people made decent livings building this stuff and our national security did not depend on mercurial and, sometimes hostile, foreign governments selling our technology to us.
For techies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5SzKM7g5Ds (about 30 minutes)
Nick, poignant and funny. I’m still voting for Trump but far from convinced he’s the incarnation of George Washington. I’m hoping for lots of really great things. I’m rather expecting the maintenance or growth of the Political Class’s power and entrenchment, an expansion of government (i.e., oppression) and a bureaucracy that is much more efficient at effecting that oppression.
DaVinci, gross tariffs on US products are a problem (and we seem to to have some), but Trumps assertion that our trade deficit is a yuge problem is ignorant. I’d dazzle you with my brilliance on the matter but Dr. Williams did a FAR better job than I could: http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2016/03/23/trade-deficit-angst-n2137223
@39 – Matt: Walter Williams is a smart man but his economics are a bit too libertarian to me. Libertarians view people as purely economic actors. Sounds OK in theory but a society is more than economic actors.
In the case of China buying our debt – I hardly see that as a good thing. We owe so much money to China (and others) that they get a veto on US policy at home and abroad. Those bits of green paper we send China are leverage China has over the US.
Mark Steyn wrote of the Suez crisis during the Eisenhower years. The British, French, and Israel responded militarily and entered Egypt. For reasons I don’t understand, Ike wanted them out of Egypt so the US let the Brits know that if they didn’t pull out, the US would sell off British debt from WW-II. The Chancellor of the Exchequer told the PM that this would cause the UK economy to collapse. The Brits withdrew, the PM resigned, and the UK faded.
If wartime allies and pals can do this, just think what the Chinese, Saudis, Russians, et al can do.
Free trade has its costs:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-22/in-backyard-of-rnc-drugs-vanishing-jobs-strain-rural-america
Not everyone can make a living brokering taxicab rides and running the oh-so vital industries of Facebook and Instagram.