On the Record | Britain Itches for Freedom and a Trade Accord with Trump’s America

Please see my latest wire for The New York Sun, ‘Britain Itches for Freedom and a Trade Accord with Trump’s America’:

President-elect Trump is in like Flynn with America’s most enduring “special relationship.” For though his electoral victory is the cause of protests at home and unease at European capitals, “Mr. Brexit” basks in favorable reviews from the British government. Small wonder. Both nascent administrations swept to office on a wave of anti-establishment populism.

Leading the welcoming party are Brexiteers who spearheaded efforts to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union and regain the sovereign powers it had ceded to the continent. UKIP’s former leader, Nigel Farage, calls Mr. Trump “instinctively Anglophile;” Britain’s foreign secretary Boris Johnson is urging EU colleagues to cease their “collective whinge-o-rama” and accept the incoming American administration. Mr. Johnson, himself New-York born, betrayed affinities for across the pond when he christened the June 23 vote for Brexit Britain’s “Independence Day.”

Prime Minister May, in an address earlier this week at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, echoed an openness to Trump. Mrs. May, who became premier when her pro-EU predecessor David Cameron resigned following the vote for British independence, began by noting their joint brash rise to high office: she, to “forge a bold, new confident future for ourselves in the world;” Mr. Trump, “who defied the polls and the pundits all the way up to election day itself.”

So 2016 is the year of change politics and “when people demand change, it is the job of politicians to respond.” Mrs. May has reason to sympathize with Mr. Trump, as both will be contending with obstructionists.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.

On the Record | Trump Awakens the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Please see my latest post for the Quarterly Review, ‘Trump Awakens the Entrepreneurial Spirit’:

Businessmen don’t understand politics. Success in the marketplace doesn’t necessarily follow in the political arena. Early criticism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign were variations on this theme, from the first day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy. How that tune has changed. Trump’s business acumen may prove his greatest political asset to an America that elects him president.

He may be learning on the fly the science of politics, but Trump instinctively comprehends the craft of intuiting the people’s discontent and offering them an alternative to the Capitol Hill duopoly. Whether on illegal immigration, terrorist threats, endless wars, or disappearing jobs, Trump reads the American mood like the practised pols of old. What he lacks in sophistication he more than compensates with gut instinct.

His outsider status is Trump’s self-proclaimed ace card — he’s not a politician but he understands how they operate, since he’s been negotiating with them all his life as a mega-developer. It’s these transformative skills that he exploits in his White House bid. ‘I’ve been very lucky. I’ve led a great life,’ he told an audience Sunday in Greeley, Colorado. ‘Now I want to give back to the country which has been so good to me.’

Read more . . .

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It may surprise that a student of the political careers of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, and Sir John A. Macdonald would take such a dim view of protectionism. I simply refer you to 19^thcentury French economic journalist Frédéric Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms and his rigorous deconstruction of the protectionist argument.

With respect to Donald Trump and his policy of border tariffs, as I suggest in this article (and my two columns to which I link), Trump has offered two alternative methods of addressing American business decline: an end to global currency manipulation and entrepreneurial innovation.

And it is Trump’s appeal to the entrepreneur and to the ‘law of markets’ in which ‘demand is constituted by supply’ where great opportunity lies.

So my approach has been much like Kennedy’s attitude to Khrushchev’s conflicting messages during the Cuban Missile Crisis: ignore the one full of bluster and bellicosity, and focus instead on the note promising hope and a way forward. Take Trump’s protectionist threat as a negotiating bid with other nations (and U.S. industries) while defending and encouraging his call to entrepreneurs.

Conservative essayist Joseph Sobran limned the political divide between nomocracy with its simple plan to enforce the ‘rule of law’ and teleocracy with its vision of the perfect society to foist upon an unsuspecting public.

Donald Trump is, in my view, a nomocrat, as evidenced by his ‘America First’ presidential campaign. As such, he should be criticised when he errs and, if elected President, be subject to the checks and balances of American constitutional federalism; but Trump should also be praised when in the right and given all the support and assistance of the American people.

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My thanks to editor Dr Leslie Jones of the Quarterly Review.

On the Record | Trump’s Off-Hand Aside on State Competition Opens a Door on Policy

Please see my latest wire for The New York Sun, ‘Trump’s Off-Hand Aside on State Competition Opens a Door on Policy’:

Give The Donald his due: rarely is there a dull moment at a Trump rally. Last night at Geneva, Ohio, he ruminated on his “America First” economic policy. Mr. Trump returned to his protectionist message that companies moving manufacturing jobs out of country would be subject to a 35% tariff at the border. The he added a twist with the potential to reshape American enterprise.

“Our good jobs are going to other countries. So we’re going to stop it. It’s not even hard to stop it. And when they know there is that kind of a consequence, they’re not leaving, they’re staying,” Trump reiterated. Then, almost nonchalantly, he added: “They may go to a different State, and that’s different. Right? But they’re staying, they’re staying in our country.”

In a stroke of ostensibly unconscious genius, he recast a problematic policy into the promise of voluntary interstate competition, shorn of federal coercion. Free marketeers have always chafed at Mr. Trump’s protectionist program, which goes against every laisser-faire tenet of free trade, comparative advantage, and consumer choice. Yet they were faced with the fact that jobs were fleeing to foreign jurisdictions, leaving displaced American workers with few alternatives.

Mr. Trump assuaged these misgivings by focusing on currency manipulation, promising to bring forward legislation against Communist China and marking the Federal Reserve’s own easy money policies for contributing to what he calls in America a “false economy.” The limits of this demarche in enthusing voters were evident. Something more, to capture the imagination and spirit of American initiative, is needed.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.

On the Record | Trump Rallies Entrepreneurial Spirit to Restore the American Dream

A golden-haired hero arrived in Toledo, Ohio, Wednesday last to rescue the American Dream. Donald J. Trump is its paladin: “We’re going to have this economy work again for you.”

The spirit that shook thirteen colonies to independence and catapulted a nation to world-power status a mere century later will rise again. Anæmic growth and stagnant employment will come to an end, he promised, by unleashing the competitive initiative held in check by government red tape.

Please see my latest posting for the American Thinker, ‘Rallying the entrepreneurial spirit’:

The guardians of economic orthodoxy took issue with Trump from the beginning, whether it was his tariff threat against foreign imports or his promise to penalize manufacturers who moved industries out of country. Classical economists, from Smith to Ricardo to Mill and beyond, had demonstrated that Western civilization was built upon the foundations of division of labor and the law of comparative advantage. How did Trump imagine he could “make America great again” when he flouted the free trade principles responsible for said greatness?

Over the summer Trump redeemed himself. He focused on currency manipulation as a key component of unfair foreign competition -- hand-in-hand with incompetent American trade negotiators -- while taking aim at high taxes, regulatory burdens, and Federal Reserve chicanery among the factors contributing to President Obama and the Democrat Party’s “false economy.”

“The contrast between the presidential contenders could not be starker,” writes Trump economic advisor Lawrence Kudlow. “Mr. Trump has an economic-recovery-and-prosperity plan. Mrs. Clinton has an austerity-recession plan.”

Read more . . .

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My thanks to the editors at the American Thinker.

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With the arrival of the autumnal equinox, it’s that time of year again to recommend the quintessential fall film, The Trouble with Harry.

Starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine, Edmund Gwenn and Mildred Natwick, with a young Jerry Mathers, director Alfred Hitchcock set this 1955 classic in a Vermont countryside bursting with a riot of colour.

Part mystery, part romantic comedy, this film is an excellent way to welcome the arrival of autumn — when the air is crisp, the leaves turn, and gilded sunlight throws long shadows, you’re sure to be humming Bernard Hermann’s wonderful score in anticipation.

(Trailer below to whet your interest; once hooked, enjoy this complete YouTube video of The Trouble with Harry.)