This week saw the dawning of what President Trump referred to as “Liberation Day” – a day on which the USA levied heavy tariffs on the rest of the world, to re-balance its trading relationships with other countries. Upon closer examination, it does appear as if the tariff rates levied on other countries were picked, essentially, out of a hat, because there seems to be little rhyme or reason, or any particularly solid geopolitical analysis, behind any of the rates.
That, of course, is not the point.
It is not about geopolitics. It is about sending a message to the world, and to the American people.
That message is simple:
The era of neoliberal globalisation is DEAD.
That particularly stupid and noxious ideology has as its foundation the so-called “rules-based international order” – which is, as I have pointed out before, a lot like “Grape Nuts”, or “Christian Science”. It is a total contradiction in terms, because it is not rules-based, nor international, nor in the least bit orderly. The basic premise of neoliberal globalisation is that the entire world should look like the democratic, liberal, open-market West, where financialisation reigns supreme over real production of actual things, and a small and highly connected oligarchy rules over the masses while pretending to uphold some strange form of “dumbocracy”.
Small wonder, then, that the rest of the world rejects this model.
Moreover, the intellectual basis for neoliberalism, and globalisation in general, is totally and fatally flawed. One of its central pillars is the doctrine – dogma, really – of “free trade”. This is itself a colossal intellectual fraud, based on the analysis of a lawyer – not an economist – named David Ricardo, who used his theory of “Comparative Advantage” to convince the UK to push for the repeal of the Corn Laws, that severely restricted imports of foreign-produced corn into the UK.
Ricardo’s idea came from essentially reducing economics down to a “two-body problem”, of interactions between two highly simplified entities representing trading economies. He then also froze all other interactions in place, and only allowed the prices of two goods or services to vary. This boiling down of economic phenomena into extremely simplified models is part of what we know today as the “Ricardian Vice”, and it is a very good way to come to intellectually elegant but totally erroneous conclusions, based on vast oversimplifications of reality.
This is not the time nor the place for a detailed dissection of the reasons why free trade does not work. A far greater and more powerful intelligence than my own – name Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Voxemort the Most Malevolent and Terrible, did it for us, years go, in an actual debate with a University of Chicago economist. He won, HANDILY, simply by showing that the intellectual basis for the dogma of free trade is a total fraud.
The upshot of all of this is that
His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, might actually succeed in liberating the US economy from a very terrible and stupid dogma, that has crippled its industries and destroyed its manufacturing base.
That MIGHT happen – IF the FUSA actually invests in domestic manufacturing and production, to replace the imports lost from tariffs. And those tariffs WILL cause significant trade disruptions for a while, resulting in higher inflation, for a while – but, IF the FUSA does the right thing and restarts its domestic manufacturing processes, THEN it will result in a substantial increase in prosperity at home.
The example of Russia is highly instructive in this regard, though the parallels are NOT exact. Like the FUSA, Russia is blessed with BOUNTIFUL resources – though, unlike the FUSA, Russia never outsourced its primary production capabilities. And after the Brandon Fake Maladministration levied the SANKSHUNS FRUM HELLE!!! against Mordor, the Orks over there quickly and effectively reindustrialised their economy, and simply replaced most of what they once got from the West, with domestic analogues.
Many of those analogues are of better quality than what the West produced, by the way.
All I can say is that the global freakout over the Trump Tariffs is largely unwarranted. Things will settle down soon enough. The big question is whether Drumpf and his colleagues will do the right thing now, and focus on reindustrialising the American heartland. We shall see.
Anyway, enough of the economics lectures for now. That is hardly the reason why you are here, of course.
This week’s lovely lady is Ira Asllani, age 22 from Albania, and an actual legitimate model – whose sister, Ema, is also an internationally recognised model, and has also featured in this most beloved series. I leave it to you, the discerning reader, to decide which one is the more attractive.
Happy Friday, gents.
1 Comment
Albanian or Spanish as listed for her equally lovely sister. Regardless, too dangerous for mere mortals.