On the Record | Government Is the Cause of “Brexit-Trump Syndrome”

Please see my latest post for the Quarterly Review, ‘Government Is the Cause of “Brexit-Trump Syndrome”’:

The Powers That Be never fail to demonstrate why they have earned the enmity of the average citizen. Bound up in a cocoon of self-satisfaction and self-denial, their political coup de grâce cannot come soon enough. This self-important élite are flummoxed by the people’s revolt in Britain and America, known respectively as Brexit and the Trump movement. A recent column dispatched from the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science amply displays their continuing bewilderment.

Coining the term ‘Brexit-Trump Syndrome’, British academics Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato claim that an inability to understand economic reality explains why average working-class citizens, who suffered lost jobs and wages and failed to bounce back from the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 (despite billions spent in stimulus schemes), voted either to exit the European Union or put Donald Trump in the White House. Both described as ‘disastrous’ socio-economic choices. The implications drawn are that people were duped into voting against their financial interests. Au contraire.

To counter such continuing nostrums leading to government and economic failure, there is no better guide forward to liberty and prosperity than John Stuart Mill.

Read more . . .

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

On the Record | Clinton’s Pledge on Debt Emerges as a Risible Claim

Please see my latest wire for The New York Sun, ‘Clinton’s Pledge on Debt Emerges as a Risible Claim’:

A risible headline comes courtesy of Hillary Clinton. “I am not going to add a penny to the national debt,” she promises. Raucous readers are permitted a moment to compose themselves.

Let’s be generous and take the former secretary of state at her word. Seriously. How does she plan to pay for the largesse of her presidential platform, be it infrastructure and research spending, enriching ObamaCare, subsidizing college — among other emoluments to its base?

Vote-buying is an art form among Democrats, who no longer camouflage the contours of their platform, summarized as any number of “soak the rich” vendettas, targeted through income, capital gains, corporate, or inheritance tax hikes. “We’re going to go where the money is,” Mrs. Clinton admits in a restatement of what is called “Sutton’s law,” after Willie “The Actor” Sutton. “We’re going to make the wealthy pay their fair share.”

Without doubt, a cheer erupts from Mrs. Clinton’s constituency, exulting over their supremacy over “the other,” ignorant that no one escapes the consequences of tax increases, the poor and middle class least of all. Revenge is a dish best served as cold comeuppance.

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

On the Record | Mill Power

Please see my latest post for the Quarterly Review, ‘Mill Power’:

On the campaign stump, Donald Trump’s visceral answer to manufacturing decline has been called a self-defeating return to the processes of primitive economics. But Trump’s route to powering America’s revival does lead through a mill — John Stuart Mill.

Trump’s economic prescription to ‘Make America Great Again’ by imposing tariff walls to foreign trade has been lampooned by mainstream economists as equating the Great Depression hysteria that gave rise to the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which saw affected nations impose retaliatory trade restrictions.

Many of these same economists prefer their own Depression-era madness, in the form of Keynesian stimulus that argues that downturns are caused by a lack of aggregate demand, requiring government spending to prime the pump and restore consumerism.

Long before Lord Keynes, however, nineteenth-century classical economists had debunked this fallacy, notably J. S. Mill.

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My thanks to Dr Leslie Jones of the Quarterly Review and to Professor Steven Kates of RMIT University, who introduced me to the classical economics of J.B. Say and J.S. Mill, and to Ricardo’s succinct refutation of Malthus: ‘Men err in their productions, there is no deficiency of demand.’