On February 8, 1837, having failed to secure the vice presidency of the United States in the Electoral College vote, Richard Mentor Johnson became the only U.S. Vice President to be elected to the position by the U.S. Senate according to the provisions of the Constitution’s Twelfth Amendment.
Take the subject of yesterday’s Common Sense, trade protectionism. Trump is plain speaking on this issue, and it is all-too-obvious that Trump harbors old autarkist notions of trade: it’s as if he resents having to pay foreigners for anything.
His apparent resentment of benefiting others — alien others — is what’s so ultra-right-wingéd about him, and why leftists instinctively hate him.
And it’s why many free trade economists regard him as a complete and utter moron. His basic attitude appears to be that trade that benefits The Other must hurt us, and that’s just plain wrong.
But sometimes traders do aim to harm us.
This is where Trump’s attacks on trade with China make more sense. For when we deal with China, we don’t just make Chinese workers and businesspeople stronger, we make the Chinese State stronger — most particularly, the Chinese Communist Party. And that organization has set itself as the enemy not only of the United States but also of all competing states . . . and the very idea of individual freedom.
Free trade is great, because voluntary trades make both sides better off, and all sides are positively advantaged even when many participants are out-competed and required to re-tool, re-group, and re-invent.
Yet, free trade with those who seek to destroy you is quite problematic. And this is not often figured into the elaborate reasoning offered by free-market advocates.
Trump instinctively knows this, looking warily at those who would use the strength they gain from their people’s trades to transform market power into military power. There exist free traders who think this cannot happen. They are wrong.
The point is to recognize threats and defend ourselves while also embracing the mutual benefits of trade whenever possible.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), chapter 26.
Happily common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy.
On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly on power, thus ushering the way for the dissolution of the putatively communist empire.
Why?
“We give them military protection,” he offered.
Then things got weird.
“We don’t need them to build our cars,” Donald Trump added. “We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need them for anything.”
Shocking? Yes. But not just for the disrespect shown to our northern neighbors.
What’s most shocking is our president’s ignorance of economics. While we don’t “need” Canada for any of the things Trump mentioned, we’re better off trading with Canada than not. The sending of “billions of dollars” up north is neither charity nor waste; the gains both sides make are apparent in the voluntary trades themselves.
It’s as if he thinks if “we” must pay anyone, it should be to ourselves, that is, to our fellow countrymen.
Behind this is that old crank notion, protectionism: “we have big deficits with Canada, like we have with all countries.”
Now, it’s true that Canadians send more raw materials to the U.S. than we send to them, and that we send them more dollars than they send us theirs: that’s what “trade deficit” means.
But how is this bad for us?
Trump doesn’t explain. “I look at some of the deals made and I say, ‘Who the hell made these deals?’ They’re so bad.”
Mr. Trump identifies no specific trade rules or agreement; he doesn’t say which are unfair, or why; nor does he say who made them. But the trades that pile up to that overall deficit, each was made by Americans and Canadians who thought the deal best for them.
Trump’s seemingly goofy idea of adding Canadian provinces to the U.S. as new states would have one great benefit: more trades with these good people than ever. This belies Trump’s far, far more troublesome notion that we need nothing from Canada. We need everything. As Canadians do.
That is, freedom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Maelstrom II,” Playboy (April 1965).
On February 6, 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a super heavy launch vehicle, made its maiden flight.
The payload was random/not-random: A Tesla Roadster. Elon Musk runs both SpaceX and Tesla.
Paul Jacob wrote about this at the time.
SpaceX boasts the Falcon Heavy as one of its chief successes:
Falcon Heavy is composed of three reusable Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft. As one of the world’s most powerful operational rockets, Falcon Heavy can lift nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lbs) to orbit.
That’s just for starters. Trump & Company is taking all the discretion it can to fire government agents who persecuted the once and current president in what was, certainly, a concerted campaign to scuttle his first presidency . . . and any chance at a second.
There are several contexts to all this. One: we are witnessing a purge of those who worked against him. The other is a more general context: Trump has promised to cut down the size of government, and that can only be done by firing people — as Elon Musk is developing with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
This has a lot of people worried. “If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare,” frets The Bulwark. Robert Kuttner states that most of what is being done through executive order is illegal — only Congress can dismantle what Congress authorized. NPR notes that DOGE leader Musk is not even legally hirable by the federal government.
Illegal government is, ipso facto, tyrannical.
But there exists a relevant bottom line: is the Trump color revolution being “tyrannical” against the American people, or “merely” against federal employees?
The federal government itself has been rogue for decades. Much of what it does is unconstitutional as well as abusive.
The Constitution is a vast system of checks upon politicians, functionaries, and rapacious private interests on the make. To those who itch to practice real tyranny, its chains themselves appear tyrannical. If the net effect of Trump’s barrage of executive orders and DOGE edicts is to reduce government burdens, is it really the kind of tyranny we must freak out about?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The heroes of the books I read, The Lord of the Rings and the Foundation series, always felt a duty to save the world.
Elon Musk, quoted in Tad Friend’s feature in The New Yorker, “Plugged In” (August 17, 2009).
The detour made him late for work at the company of which he is CEO, Cantor Fitzgerald, a leading financial service firm then located on top floors of the World Trade Center.
His brother Gary “and 657 of my other friends and colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald” lost their lives that day.
Lutnick asked the surviving employees, about a thousand people, to help him rebuild the company and help the 658 families who had lost a loved one. Over the next five years, they all donated 25 percent of their salaries to those families, about $180 million. These acts of generosity “stitched my soul back together,” he said.
“My employees never expected to get paid back, but I had other ideas. In 2008, we took a division of our company public and each employee received double what they had given.”
Lutnick does seem like “just a good dude,” as J.D. Vance describes him.
I don’t know whether he will do a good job as Secretary of Commerce. Leading a major government agency isn’t the same as leading a major business. I guess part of the answer depends on whether we, like Lutnick, support President Trump’s trade policies.
I do suspect he’ll be a better head of that department than the last one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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