On the Record | Making a Case for Trump’s Entrepreneurial Inaugural Address

Please see my latest wire for The American Spectator, ‘Making a Case for Trump’s Entrepreneurial Inaugural Address’:

PRESS RELEASE

Hell’s Justice Department issues forth this “Devil’s Advocate” brief…

We are compelled to respond to the Institute of Economic Affairs’ policy head Ryan Bourne’s excellent analysis of President Donald Trump’s paean to protectionism in his first Inaugural Address. (See how we devils like to taunt our colleagues in the #NeverTrump department?) In response to the President’s admonition to “Buy American and Hire American,” Bourne replies that “If Trump goes down the protectionist route, he’ll be hurting American consumers and the growth potential of the US economy.”

In general, we agree with Bourne on the benefits of free trade: lower prices, greater and more diverse availability of goods and services, specialization as a facet of the division of labor, greater productivity, and overall more wealth for all. Yet it also behooves us to mention drawbacks to free trade, for those who lose their jobs to foreign competition and who must either take up new employment with lower emoluments, re-train, or relocate to more financially promising communities. Some, sadly, will find all these alternatives unpalatable or impossible to fulfill. In the larger scheme of things, these are short-term drawbacks, but for the individuals and families involved, they are no small matter and the negative impact can be great.

Nevertheless, we Devil’s Advocates can point to two elements of President Trump’s Inaugural that may give free traders consolation.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Wlady Pleszczynski of The American Spectator.

On the Record | Education of a Quick Study Presidential Candidate

Please see my latest article for the American Thinker, ‘Education of a Quick Study Presidential Candidate’:

The Donald never ceases to amaze. Much like the developer’s ladder he climbed under the tutelage of his father, Trump has scaled the political ladder with equal speed and facility. He has risen from the no-chance dilettante candidate to the GOP’s nominee in a (current) statistical tie with his Democrat adversary for the White House. Friend and foe alike are nonplussed. But the quick-study presidential candidate would be no surprise to Alexis de Tocqueville.

Sent to the United States by the French government to study prison reform, Tocqueville encompassed the entire republican experiment, publishing his reflections as Democracy in America.

The New World’s break with aristocratic Europe fascinated him; immediacy, dynamism, and action took the place of refined, unhurried contemplation. “The democratic social state and democratic institutions lead most men to act constantly,” Tocqueville wrote; “now, the habits of mind that are appropriate to action are not always appropriate to thought.”

Critics of Trump will read into these sentiments an indictment of the Republican presidential nominee, whose early campaign was marked by cringing off-the-cuff statements and unfiltered appraisals of his opponents.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to the editors at the American Thinker.

On the Record | Paine the Economic Royalist

Please see my first article for the American Thinker, ‘Paine the Economic Royalist’:

The foibles of most public men are unearthed while they walk among us. “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” But revisionism makes history its palimpsest. Heroic pamphleteer Thomas Paine is but the latest of the Founding generation laid low by this twenty-first-century zeitgeist.

His sin? Paine was a bimetallist who believed in commodity currency -- gold or silver. Honored in his time, today’s establishment would have the New Rochelle revolutionary tarred-and-feathered for his heterodoxy.

Paine’s motivation for writing Dissertations in the mid-1780s was a Pennsylvanian banking bill and the rivalry it spawned: one bank with notes guaranteed by specie versus another with no guarantee other than legal tender laws, which he reasoned belied the currency’s worthlessness and “calculated to support fraud and oppression.”

“Nature has provided the proper materials for money, gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous,” Paine wrote; they were “the emissions of nature: paper is the emission of art.”

Read more…

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My thanks to the editors at the American Thinker.