RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/06/are-trumps-tariffs-really-tariffs/

Hysteria has erupted here and abroad over President Trump’s threats to level trade tariffs against particular countries.

Both American and foreign critics blasted them variously as either counterproductive and suicidal or unfair, imperialistic, and xenophobic.

Certainly, tariffs are widely hated by doctrinaire economists. They complain that tariffs burden consumers with higher prices to protect weak domestic industries that, shielded from competition, will have no incentive to improve efficiency.

Their ideal is “free” trade. Supposedly a free global market alone should adjudicate which particular industry in any country can produce the greatest good for the world’s consumers, whether defined by lower prices or better quality, or both.

Even when “free trade” becomes “unfair trade”—such as China’s massive mercantile surpluses—many neoliberal economists still insist that even subsidized foreign imports are beneficial.

Cheap imports, Americans were told, supposedly still lowered prices for consumers, still forced domestic producers to economize to remain competitive, and still brought “creative destruction,” as inefficient domestic industries properly gave way to more efficient, market-driven ones.

But many exporters to the U.S. are propped up by their own governments.

They may seem more competitive only because their governments want to dump products at a loss to capture market share, subsidize their businesses’ overhead to protect domestic employment or seek to create a monopoly over a strategic industry.

Yet when Trump threatened to level tariffs against Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, China, or the European Union, they were not primarily aimed at propping up particular inefficient U.S. industries at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/did-big-government-pull-us-out-of-the-great-depression/

The conventional wisdom is that the Great Depression that began in October 1929 was the fault of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Republicans in general. Big business was out of control, and big government should have reined it in with regulations that would have prevented the crash from happening in the first place. Herbert Hoover’s disastrous presidency (1929-1933) is generally presented as evidence of this: most establishment historians echo the charge that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats began making in 1932, that Hoover’s inaction and trust in the power of the economy to right itself only deepened the crisis and lengthened the Depression. Then Roosevelt’s New Deal smorgasbord of government programs put Americans back to work and finally provided the economy the stimulus it needed to recover.

Virtually every aspect of that conventional wisdom is false. As Rating America’s Presidents shows, if Coolidge had been president in October 1929, he would have without any doubt followed the precedent established by Van Buren, Grant, Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt that Hoover explicitly rejected in his memoirs: do nothing, recognizing that economic relief was not the federal government’s responsibility, and let market forces heal the economy. What Hoover doesn’t mention is that in all four of those earlier cases, the president’s policy worked, and the economy eventually righted itself, although in some cases it took longer to do so than some would have liked.

In contrast, Hoover and then Roosevelt oversaw the massive expansion of the federal government in response to the Great Depression, and it became the longest-lasting economic crisis in American history, not definitively ending until 1941. Government intervention didn’t end the Depression; it prolonged it. Hoover’s programs only added to the burden ordinary Americans had to carry, especially when he increased taxes in 1932. The tax increases were unavoidable, however: contrary to the assumptions of many Americans today, big government programs don’t magically pay for themselves.

https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-breaking-history-radicals-have-burned-california-before-karen-bass-gavin-newsom?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I think about the recent tragedy of the California fires—and the questions we all have about what went wrong—there is one story I keep coming back to.

A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.

But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch. And so he rallied environmental groups—which ensured that the fire safety project got put on pause.

To me, this episode captures something fundamental about California: Its path to ruin is paved with the noblest intentions.

The Golden State was once the place where industry and imagination locked arms and showed us how great the American experiment could be. It secured our democracy by manufacturing and engineering the weapons that won the Second World War. It built the dream factory of Hollywood and the workshops of the future that we call Silicon Valley. Without California, The American Century would never have begun.

But in our current century, and 50 years of Democrat rule, California has fallen apart—largely thanks to progressive policies attempting to make the world a better place. Tent cities have popped up under bridges and beside freeways; in just the past 10 years, homelessness has risen by over 50 percent. Downtown San Francisco has also become the site of multiple open-air drug markets. Opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high in the city in 2023. Violent crime has risen, too: As of 2022, rates were 31 percent higher in California than in the U.S. as a whole. Last month’s fires were only the latest reminder that the state is burning up.

To understand how the state unraveled, we need to go back to a decade of despair and decadence: the 1970s. The dark turn began—where else—in the petri dish of progressivism that is San Francisco, which around this time gave birth to the hippie movement. If you want to understand how the radical left can burrow deeply into a state’s bureaucracy, courts, and political machines, look no further than the San Fran ’70s.

California has been a battleground before, and it all began with the summer of love. The year was 1967; the setting, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, a magnet for the dreamers, Vietnam vets, and fans of the new psychedelic rock. It was a wild time. Marijuana plants were everywhere. Communes cooked dinner for anyone who wanted it. A group called The Diggers opened a store where everything was free. The hippies were remodeling their little corner of society. They wanted to spread peace.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/06/trumps-revolution-of-common-sense-brings-out-the-worst-in-democrats/

When asked by a reporter about how many of the 3,500 illegal immigrants arrested since President Donald Trump took office were criminals, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “All of them.” The reporter was flabbergasted, but Leavitt was right. Those who entered the country illegally by definition are guilty of committing a crime.

This is what Trump meant when he said in his inaugural address that “we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.” The Democrats’ response has been anything but common-sensical.

The first weeks of the Trump administration have been a whirlwind of these sorts of common-sense orders and pronouncements that, as our I&I/TIPP survey showed (see “Trump’s Executive Orders Have Solid Voter Backing: I&I/TIPP Poll”), are popular with everyone except out-of-touch Democrats.

Sending troops to secure the southern border is a common-sense solution to a national crisis. So is letting border patrol officials do their jobs. So is deporting the millions here illegally, starting with hardened criminals.
Requiring federal workers to return to their offices full time is perfectly reasonable.
Declaring that there are two genders – something humankind has known since Adam – and banning the use of taxpayers’ money for federal “gender identity” programs might rankle the far left, but it makes perfect sense to everyone else.
Blocking access to abundant domestic energy supplies while China builds a coal plant every day makes no sense. Boosting oil and gas production does.
Ending racist, divisive, and mostly likely illegal “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs and instead focusing on skills and merit when making federal government hiring decisions counts as common sense to everyone except left-wing extremists.
How about freezing federal grants until someone has a chance to review them? Trump had to backpedal on this, but only because the order was poorly worded. Even so, it immediately exposed some truly ridiculous things that the federal government supports with your hard-earned cash.
Requiring regulators to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one they impose is the definition of common sense when you consider that the Code of Federal Regulations is more than 100,000 pages long.
Our favorite common-sense move was to offer federal workers a buyout option. Companies struggling to make ends meet do this all the time. The federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and can ill afford to have workers on the payroll who don’t want to be there, as well as the many who shouldn’t.