Politics Thread!

[KlaxonCow]

Trump is now trying to impose a tit-for-tat that could provoke a wider trade war, in that if countries agree to freeze China out of their trade, then they can get a better tariff deal from the US.

The insanity of this situation is that China is being the reasonable one, defending free trade. They've asked people not to acquiesce to Trump's bullying and stand for free international trade and fairness.

And this is a problem for, for example, Japan, whose trade with the US is about 20% and only about 15% with China. But Trump is forcing a "me or them" decision on them - if they seek to trade with China, then their US tariff goes up.

But China's right that if nations like Japan or South Korea acquiesce to Trump's demands, shit just gets worse in international trade, as they are provoking other nations to fight a trade war for them, effectively.

I know it's a big ask that no-one wants, but America really does have to be cut out and isolated, or Trump's insanity will pollute international trade and make everything worse for everyone. The world has to resist and leave Trump to make America more expensive, if he insists, but that the rest of international trade carries on in the usual fashion, so he's just hurting his own nation and this doesn't descend into an all-out global trade war, which'll just make everyone vastly poorer.

(And for no real reason either. Bringing manufacturing back to America - and fully inside America, with no imports, or you're not escaping tariffs - would take decades, and it wouldn't bring jobs. Manufacturing is increasingly automated and if you're bringing it back to America, then it has to be as fully automated as possible. Because Americans are not going to accept slave labour wages, so the only way to compete internationally is to have as minimal a wage bill as possible. I mean, there was an underlying reason why manufacturing left America for China in the first place.

Again, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how this all works from Trump. A trade deficit is not an intrinsically bad thing, but he's acting like it is. Like, as many have commented, consider that you're in a trade deficit with your local corner shop. You buy all these things from the corner shop, but the corner shop never buys anything from you. Trump would characterise this as being "ripped off" by your local corner shop.)

While I appreciate that Japan is in a sticky position - it currently obtains more from the US than China (although that was deliberately US policy before Trump showed up, to assert more influence than China, on the country that it nuked twice) - if it starts playing Trump's game, then shit hits the fan. Yes, they can get a better tariff with the US for playing along on that 20% of their imports (although, we've seen that Trump imposes 10% minimum on everyone anyway), but then China might retaliate with higher tariffs on that 15% of imports.

Hopefully, China doesn't do that, as it's not as insane as Trump. But it could well do so, and then an all-out trade war starts happening.

This has to be kept isolated to America only. If Trump wants to make US trade unattractive, then let him sink his own nation. But don't let it spread beyond America.

Let America make itself more expensive, and then just look for someone else who can get you a better deal internationally. Cut out the cancer.

This is for America's benefit ultimately as well. Because when the insanity of this policy is increasingly felt by Americans, then the pressure will ramp up on Trump to rescind the whole stupid policy. He's been forced to backtrack and "pause" for 90 days (although, I wish people would stop calling it a "pause" when there's still the minimum 10% tariff applied - that's not a pause, it's just a discount from the threatened even worse rates). If it gets worse, then even some Republicans might be forced, by their constituents, to grow a backbone and tell "King Trump" that the Emperor is naked and he's lost their support.

If we can trust the midterms to be free and fair elections - and it's an insanity that we're doubting this from the United States, but we all saw Trump attempt a coup on January 6th and is talking about a wholly illegal "third term" already - then polling and special elections so far (and that it's also quite natural in the US for them to vote against the ruling party in midterms, to balance things out) indicate that the Democrats could get Congress back and hopefully give it some backbone to actually challenge these "executive orders" which are really not legal at all. The tariffs should actually be in Congress's power - they hold the purse strings - and the deportations are being done under the bullshit of some ancient "Enemies Act" by claiming a "national emergency" when there isn't one, so that bullshit should be made to end, pronto.

But, yeah, do we actually get midterms that can even be trusted now? Things might have progressed too far towards fascism that it ain't coming back without a fight.

[zip accident]

Funny thing is, free trade is a caplitalist/right-wing notion.

Tarriffs are the old way, the corn laws and so on.

Even the corn laws were new in their day.

[Dio]

Odd example. The repeal of the Corn Laws was primarily a left-wing policy motivated by the fact that people were starving. It cost Peel his government and was one of the catalysts for forming the Liberal Party, which was about as left as politics got in those days. It wasn't a matter of free trade principle.

[F-ZeroOne]

China has sent back a Boeing airliner - market value $55 million - as due to the tariffs, it’s no longer economical to lease it. Luckily, all of Boeings other recent projects have gone swimmingly well and not been subject to massive cost overruns, and they probably won’t try to make up the difference by increasing the cost of the USAFs next generation jet fighter they’ve recently been selected to produce.

Greatest. Economic. Genius. Of. Our. Age!

[KlaxonCow]

Free trade isn't really a left or right thing.

Free market capitalism - of the "let the markets decide" variety - is right-wing, sure, and that might be the current implementation of free trade in the world. But they're not the same thing.

Marxists are internationalists. They don't believe borders should exist and their warcry of "workers of the world unite" absolutely has no distasteful nationalist flavour to it at all. Then there's also "free trade coffee" in your local Bourgeois Western supermarket that can help do a little "wealth redistribution" to poor African farmers.

Marxists are not against free trade. They're against "the free market(TM)" and that particular hands-off implementation of letting the rich get richer.

(Indeed, this would be how China is ideologically fine with its "external capitalism" policies.)

And, regardless of your politics, blanket tariffs just don't pragmatically work. There's nothing but dreadful historical precedent there, making shit worse. So you can have whatever make-believe ideological world in your head you like, but it's just not reality.

Tariffs are a specific targeted strategy at best (and, even then, a "last resort" when simple trade negotiations have failed completely).

[zip accident]

Odd example. The repeal of the Corn Laws was primarily a left-wing policy motivated by the fact that people were starving. It cost Peel his government and was one of the catalysts for forming the Liberal Party, which was about as left as politics got in those days. It wasn't a matter of free trade principle.

They were a tariff though? With the intention of making farmers and landowners richer.

[F-ZeroOne]

So remember about a thousand years ago, when someone was in trouble over messaging potentially classified information using unauthorised apps? Well, theres a sequel:

https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/ ... 46480.html

[tufty]

They were a tariff though? With the intention of making farmers and landowners richer.

Yes, they were at least partly tariff-based. But they were aimed fairly and squarely at eliminating free trade, through artificially raising the prices of home grown corn and restricting the import of cheaper corn from elsewhere. The concept of free trade already existed (no point in having tariffs if there's no free trade, after all), and, as Dio points out, it was the "radical left" of the time who were pushing for free trade. Indeed, there are influential schools of left wing thought which hold that truly free trade cannot exist within a capitalist society.

In short …

Funny thing is, free trade is a caplitalist/right-wing notion.
Tarriffs are the old way, the corn laws and so on.
Even the corn laws were new in their day.

… contains twice as many pismellings as true statements.

[PFVA]

Sorry about the interruption

I'm just thinking to myself

Two people both born in South America, and in the southern portion of it, both sons of Italian immigrants and both with total different views of people and the world in general: Jair Bolsonaro and Pope Francis.

[Dio]

Odd example. The repeal of the Corn Laws was primarily a left-wing policy motivated by the fact that people were starving. It cost Peel his government and was one of the catalysts for forming the Liberal Party, which was about as left as politics got in those days. It wasn't a matter of free trade principle.

They were a tariff though? With the intention of making farmers and landowners richer.

Yes, and as a result, those - right wing, oligarchic - influences fought against their repeal.

[zip accident]

They were a tariff though? With the intention of making farmers and landowners richer.

Yes, they were at least partly tariff-based. But they were aimed fairly and squarely at eliminating free trade, through artificially raising the prices of home grown corn and restricting the import of cheaper corn from elsewhere. The concept of free trade already existed (no point in having tariffs if there's no free trade, after all), and, as Dio points out, it was the "radical left" of the time who were pushing for free trade. Indeed, there are influential schools of left wing thought which hold that truly free trade cannot exist within a capitalist society.

In short …

Funny thing is, free trade is a caplitalist/right-wing notion.
Tarriffs are the old way, the corn laws and so on.
Even the corn laws were new in their day.

… contains twice as many pismellings as true statements.

Maybe I'm taking right and left as vaguer labels than some here (which is okay, we're different people). The way I see it is a ring, if you go far enough left you end up on the right, and if you go far enough right, you end up on the left, or maybe the back of the ring is the dark side, anyhow, vague.

I'm sort of taking "free trade" to be the same sort of thing as "the free market". From "the free market" I'm getting Thatcher and Reagan's (Freedman's) "market forces" (aka the hand of Ghod against the poor) which I'm taking to be connected to Calvin's predestination, which I'm understanding as "Ghod made the poor poor to punish them, because they are evil, because he made them evil, because there had to be evil, because he said so. Which is the divine right of kings passed down to the rich.

I'm probably being a little hard on Calvin, but then again, his theory was not nice to the poor.

[Dio]

If you want to look at left and right in more subtle terms, the usual axis to add is 'authoritarianism'.

Extremes of both become much more authoritarian, and increasing authoritarianism also tends to imply a powerful elite, undermining the notional egalitarianism of the left wing.

[tufty]

Maybe I'm taking right and left as vaguer labels than some here (which is okay, we're different people). The way I see it is a ring, if you go far enough left you end up on the right, and if you go far enough right, you end up on the left, or maybe the back of the ring is the dark side, anyhow, vague.

Yeah, but that /is/ well - wrong. In both directions you end up, as Dio says, at an authoritarian state, and whilst the lot of the poor is generally not much better at one extreme than the other, the two systems are very much not the same.

I'm sort of taking "free trade" to be the same sort of thing as "the free market".

Well, terms are important. Words have meaning. The two terms are not the same thing, but neither are they mutually exclusive. Free trade is just what it says - trading between entities without financial interference from third parties (most particularly governments). Friedman's theories are a long way from being about free trade. The "free" in the "free market" part is about removing regulation from the market, and the rest of it is all monetarism - trying to control the economy by controlling the supply of money (as opposed to fiscalism, which uses government spending). It is entirely possible to have a free market, where the pricing of goods and services is entirely down to market forces, but which does not do free trade. Indeed, that's pretty much what the orange shitgibbon appears to be trying to create in the US.

[F-ZeroOne]

Welcome to health care in Kennedys America:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/rfk-jrs-favo ... heroically

Even Judge Dredd would perhaps be a little more generous in application of THE LAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!:

https://www.wonkette.com/p/yes-were-now ... scientists

[KlaxonCow]