And to demonstrate the worse bureaucratic condition of Israeli politics compared to the US, their Attorney-General says to the PM and Knesset in effect “Stop! You can’t fire him! Because I say you can’t!”
Sing it with “em, people:
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Baharav-Miara has got to go!
New post, in which I respond the the frequently-made assertion that manufacturing doesn’t matter all that much and that we should focus on ‘high-tech’ instead.
I think with few exceptions in the occidental world, a country’s enemies are to be found in its chattering classes:
== https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/de-colonizing-shakespeare-experts-blame-white-supremacy-for-playwright-s-fame-as-hometown-museum-vows-change/ar-AA1B2ea3
==
Quite frustrating as usual in that the perpetrators are never named. The one person named does not work there. She’s a faculty snot at Birmingham City University (not the University of Birmingham). The executive director left in November and the position is vacant. The chairman of the board is an elderly and well-connected homewrecker known by her former courtesy title ‘Lady Cobham’, aka the ‘quango queen’.
27% – MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki calls out Dems low favorability – Video UPDATED with more winning!!!
(Actually, I believe that the answer to your query—“…how it could be that…”—is in the last paragraph of the excellent dissection:
…In a healthy country, no respectable publisher would touch a book so profoundly dishonest. Ours is not a healthy country. In the absence of factual truth, political discourse and civic harmony are impossible. Historians like Heather Cox Richardson use partisan narratives as blunt instruments, the academic equivalent of the lawfare being waged by our politicized justice system. The national sickness this reflects cannot and will not last. But that is hardly to predict a happy future.
)
[Emphasis mine; Barry M.]
One hopes that the current administration and those that follow in its steps will be able to rally, pinpoint and prioritize fixing the most lethal threats and heal the pervasive and profound sickness.
Heather Cox Richardson another progressive fabulist/fraudster? Shocked!
Very windy here in CO, not so cold, but the wind. chill is.
So, I just made myself a bowl of Irish Oatmeal.
Tonight, Corned Beef, Cabbage, Colcannon.
Got the Colcannon recipe from a cooking class, teacher got it from her Grandmother.
Basically, here it is
Butter, Mashed Potatoes, Butter, Kale – sweated in Butter, Butter, Leaks – cooked in heavy Cream, Butter.
Shakespeare was about other cultures like cinthios tales of venice that inspired othello, holinsheds tales about the scottish play the danish chronicles et al
On “decolonizing” Shakespeare, Glenn Reynolds comments at Instapundit: “When you seek to suppress a country’s native culture, you’re not decolonizing it. You’re colonizing it.”
@SHIREHOME:Colcannon
I guess we have that about once a week; easy way to get kids to eat kale.
Well did you ever make colcannon,
made with lovely pickled cream
With the greens & scallions mingled
like a picture in a dream
Did you ever make a hole on top
to hold the meltin’ flake
Of the creamy flavoured butter
that our mothers used to make
Oh you did, so you did
so did he and so did I
And the more I think about it
sure the nearer I’m to cry
Oh weren’t them the happy days
when troubles we knew not
And our mothers made colcannon
in the little skillet pot
so what about the other 150 years, the truth about heathers’ little screed is the reverse, the Depression was the Progs, ‘never letting a crisis go to waste’ for their own reason, the 1965 iteration, was another opportunity, because tall man Goldwater, of course they blame the war, as a failure to expand the government more, an opportunity they really had under obama, although the Camel’s nose was under the tent, with Clinton, as well, of course their solutions, like the CRA revisions only cause more crises down the road, Obamacare didn’t really solve the problem of insurance, neither did the ARRA solve shortfalls in infrastructure, it wasn’t meant to, it was to allow the government to take over financial institutions even some manufacturing concerns like auto companies,
consortium like black rock spread the so called ‘woke
virus, inside corporate America, a way to’fundamentally transform’ the country from within,
the most recent experiments seems to have been employed to create this new
blue majority, that teixeira predicted, through mass immigration, that was Jeffrey Sach’s little known recipe, from 2001,
Here’s a sampling of what has been posted today by a grassroots democrat just to confirm the nuttiness is not limited to the higher ups in the party. This is not in any way unusual; they seem to actually believe this. When a large percentage of the public is in such a disturbed mental state, I assume violence can’t be far behind.
“The Panama Canal was just an excuse to invade Panama
The tariffs were just a way to soften up Canada and Mexico before invading them both;
National Security was just an excuse to invade Greenland;
The Alien Enemies Act was just an excuse to detain Canadians and British citizens
The attacks on universities and the free press were just a way to scare the public into silence and submission before calling for Martial Law and instituting a draft
The President is deeply compromised. Trump does not work for the American people. He works for Elon Musk.
Bottom line: Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s Russian handler, and he is working alongside JD Vance to destroy Europe, and with Trump to end democracy, abolish the Constitutional Republic, and invade at least all of Central and North America”
Paranoia strikes deep, as the song goes.
Macron is calling for European countries to stop relying and buying US Military gear. I say go for it
I was watching the real world as one of my granddaughter’s volleyball team won the silver bracket at a fairly large tournament this weekend. I have three granddaughters currently playing club volleyball, soon to be four. Both my daughters played volleyball into college, so it was inevitable.
But back to the virtual world. Don Boudreaux has been a free trade advocate for years. I would have more respect for his positions, if his hypotheticals and statistics included tempering data that represent both the positive and negatives to unfettered free trade.
Case in point. One of his posts points out that a trade deficit totaling over $20 trillion since 1975 hasn’t reduced American’s net worth. And he shows that by the growth of American’s net worth over the years to an astounding $1.2 million. Ignoring monetary inflation, that figure includes an inflated stock market.
While the stock market may be valued at $62 trillion, that’s an imaginary number. Suppose everyone decided to sell their shares at the same time. What would be the total sold value?
In the case of a market crash, the upper income brackets would be hardest hit.
The bottom 50% of American’s only has 13% of their net worth in stocks.
The middle 40% has 20-25% of their net worth in stocks.
The top 10% has 35-40% in stocks while the top 1% has over 50% in stocks.
Since some/much of the gains in the market has benefited with “free” trade and the outsourcing of American production to cheap labor countries, it stands to reason they would have the most to lose if we adopted a reciprocal trade standard to tariffs, along with targeted tariffs on industries vital to economic and military security.
I see two goals to Trump’s trade agenda. Produce more internal economic activity that raise revenue to the government without punitive taxes that would stifle that activity, and create more good paying jobs for that bottom 50% of Americans most left behind by the policies of the last 30-40 years.
As to Phil Gramm, his policies enacted in the late 90’s proved wrong and contributed (specifically CDS) to the Great Recession, along with the FED, CRA, Fannie and a whole host of bad policy.
So I don’t think either of these economists should be our guide for economic policies going forward.
”Macron is calling for European countries to stop relying and buying US Military gear. I say go for it”
How does making Europe set up a heavily subsidized competitor to our largest exporting industry make America better?
Unless “wealth” and “currency” are being confused (or deliberately conflated), it doesn’t seem that a “trade deficit” can be bad. It’s a term created to SOUND bad.
The worst imaginable “trade deficit” would be another country bringing goods to this one, and never taking any goods in return. In that case, our country would obviously be wealthier; we’d be getting something for nothing. Since the worst possible trade deficit makes us richer, it’s hard to see how a lesser trade deficit makes us poorer, and I’ve never seen anyone make the mathematical proof that there’s a less bad trade deficit that reverses the sign of the change in wealth from trade, I’ve just seen hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions; favorite ones being that manufacturing and agriculture are somehow more healthy or virtuous, or that fiat currency is the problem, or that we’re being “financialized”.
Of course, the other country would be taking currency of some kind in exchange, but currency is not wealth, which is why I’m pretty sure that those who say trade deficits make us somehow poorer are confusing or conflating currency and wealth, if not making some other error. The Spanish Empire improverished itself by importing gold and silver from the Americas, to the point of being proverbial: “In Spain everything is expensive except gold and silver”.
In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value. If I have a pair of shoes that I can’t wear, and you have a pair that you can’t wear, and we trade, and now we both have shoes that fit, then we have both got richer even though the number of shoes and the identities of the people are still the same.
Few of us complain of our trade deficits with our grocery stores: not once has any store I patronized ever purchased anything from me, yet I keep giving them money and they keep giving me stuff. Clearly I’m getting screwed…
Niketas, let’s use your scenario and say that Freedonia exports $100 billion of goods to us, and buys nothing from us, which would leave us with a $100 billion trade deficit. But Freedonia would have $100 billion of our currency. Currency is not unlimited. We can certainly make more of it, but that raises our indebtedness.
Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.
Freedonia could buy an American company with that $100 billion or invest it in the stock market, which would mean the wealth of the country remained static, but each year that occurs and we ship $100 billion in currency to Freedonia to buy that $100 billion of goods shipped to the country, eventually we run out of currency, unless we borrow another $100 billion.
We could always just print more of the currency we use– dollars, but that would debase/deflate it’s value.
Either way, the net worth of the country declines.
I agree with your analogy of trading shoes, but the effect is a trade deficit of zero.
Here’s is Boudreaux’s post on trade deficits and net worth.
A sample of why I find Boudreaux’s economics of diminished value.
Contrary to countless careless or uninformed assertions, it’s simply untrue that a $1 increase in the U.S. trade deficit necessarily results in a $1 decrease in Americans’ net worth – a decrease in net worth brought about either through a $1 increase in American indebtedness to foreigners or a $1 decrease in Americans’ net ownership of assets.
He needs to account for the the times it does result in a $1 decrease in Americans’ net worth.
RE: “There will always be an England.”–Notes from England’s cultural suicide watch–
England’s Shakespeare National Trust has now determined that Shakespeare and all his works, even his historic house, are instances of
of “White European Supremacy,” and will have to be “decolonized.”*
Niketas…”Few of us complain of our trade deficits with our grocery stores: not once has any store I patronized ever purchased anything from me, yet I keep giving them money and they keep giving me stuff.”
If the only grocery store in range was run by somebody that was hostile to you and threatened to cut off your groceries if you did something he didn’t like, would that still be okay with your?
David Foster, I read your post about the WSJ opinion piece, but I didn’t read the original story, since it’s behind a paywall, so I could only comment on Boudreaux’s positions on trade based on his blog.
I enjoy reading your posts and really like the variety of comments you produce, it’s great to read reactions from all types of perspectives.
As to “high tech”, so they really mean the Magnificent 7 on Wall St?
@Brian E:Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check, with bonus contradiction between one clause and the next.
@David Foster:If the only grocery store in range was run by somebody that was hostile to you…
Arguing about auxiliary assumptions, check.
Brian E…it would be nice to hear what they really do mean by ‘high-tech’…There wasn’t really all that much to the original story. They object to Trump’s use of the McKinley analogy, saying:
“Mr. Trump’s policy turns the traditional meaning of reciprocal trade on its head. He wants to achieve reciprocity only by raising tariffs, almost certainly triggering retaliation. Reciprocal trade policy as envisioned by President William McKinley, whom Mr. Trump often cites as his role model, recognized that by the dawn of the 20th century America had emerged as an economic colossus capable of producing an abundance of products that could be profitably exported. As McKinley explained, “the expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable.”
McKinley’s reciprocal trade policy was aimed at opening markets for U.S. products with agreements that lowered tariffs on imported products proportionately as other countries lowered theirs on U.S. products. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used reciprocal trade policies to back the world out of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. His successors used reciprocal trade to lift the majority of the world’s population out of poverty and achieve 75 years of peace and prosperity.”
I think it’s odd to focus *only* on trade as the engine of lifting much of the world’s population out of poverty…technology had a lot to do with it (with a broad definition of ‘technology’, not just ‘computer stuff’) as did stable legal systems and the relative absence of feudal or regulatory barriers.
It’s important to distinguish between trade which reflects the inherent comparative advantage of various locations (raising oranges in Spain, for example) versus trade which is mainly about wage and regulatory arbitrage.
Niketas, what is your definition of wealth and net worth.
David Foster, Trump has made it very clear the imposition of reciprocal tariffs is to encourage/force the trading partner to reduce their tariff, at which point we will reciprocate.
That does align with McKinley’s policies.
He does talk about tariffs as a tool to raise revenue, but that, IMO, is just to reinforce that we’ll maintain a tariff if the trading partner agrees to reduce theirs.
It’s my understanding our trading partners already, and for years, have had protective tariffs on our goods, or use other trade barriers. Reciprocal tariffs may not be a perfect remedy, but it will get their attention.
Brian E:
But Freedonia would have $100 billion of our currency. Currency is not unlimited. We can certainly make more of it, but that raises our indebtedness.
——————————————
I do not understand when people talk like this about “currency”.
Another one is “the money supply”.
These terms seems like mental relics from when dollar bills were backed by gold.
My entire life has been lived in fiat currency.
I get my salary and pay most of my bills and purchases electronically. Haven’t had a printed salary check for or been paid in cash for decades. I use a check when I want a record of a transaction in addition to my credit card statement.
In what way is this “currency” not unlimited – how is it related in any way to the government printing bills, loaning money, or other people borrowing money and holding bills?
Fiat currency is scrip with fancy printing and a bit more security for actual paper transactions. It is used by people to conduct business with no promises from the government, and no obligations by the government, to cover anything.
The amount of electronic fiat currency in circulation does not seem to me to be “limited” in any way. Unless artificially by a central bank.
What am I missing?
@Brian E:Niketas, what is your definition of wealth and net worth.
If I do that, we’ll spend all day arguing definitions. I think it’s more productive to go to the example where we almost agree:
I agree with your analogy of trading shoes, but the effect is a trade deficit of zero.
OK, let’s include some currency into this and see what happens. Suppose the shoes are identical other than fit and the need is purely fit. A one-to-one trade is easy then, and as you say, the “trade deficit” is zero. I don’t disagree with that.
OK, suppose there’s something different in the need. Suppose you have a pair of wingtips that don’t fit you and I have a different-sized pair that don’t fit me. But suppose our needs are different. Maybe I like brown shoes better and these are black. I might be less inclined to trade with you (rather than with someone else who has what I really want) and you might throw in something else, like $5 let’s say, to give me a reason to trade with you. I agree and we trade.
So, before the trade, the things that were there were two pairs of shoes of different sizes and $5. After the trade, the things that are there are the same two pairs of shoes, on different feet, and the same $5, in a different wallet.
Both us got richer; we each saw an increase in value. The amount of stuff didn’t change, it’s just in different hands. But you would go further and say that you had a “trade deficit” of $5.
I don’t dispute that there is such a thing as “trade deficit” and that it is measured in money. What I dispute is that the “trade deficit” makes you poorer. It’s a thing that is measured, but it is not inherently good or bad. Within national economies individuals and businesses run “trade deficits” with each other all the time. It’s rare not to: I mean I might work to produce electricity for the PUD, and they might power my home, but even in that case where there really is “reciprocal trade” I might not want to get paid in kilowatt-hours instead of money…
To focus on the “trade deficit” is to ignore the increase in value that we each received. You wanted (a pair of shoes that fit) more than you wanted (a pair that doesn’t fit and $5). I wanted (a pair of shoes that fit and $5) more than I wanted (a pair that didn’t fit). We both got what we wanted and we both got more than we had, in terms of our own values. The “trade deficit” is calling attention to one part of the transaction that, in this case, was the least valuable thing involved (it only came up because I wanted brown shoes a little more than the black I traded for), and identifying the change in value of the entire transaction with it.
That’s why I say “confusing/conflating wealth with currency”. Currency is a part of the change in value for both sides in the transaction, but the net flow of currency is not identical to the total change in value.
Niketas,
I salute your energy level.
For physicsguy, a Biden appointee to a top Dept. of Energy physics panel says “white empiricism” undermines the theory of relativity.
Sounds like a plan. Let’s pull the trigger, stop the killing, and git’er done!
Kate, Democratic Party Lysenkoism is a thing.
It’s their policy. They promote it, push it, boast about it and are tremendously proud of it.
In fact they’re so proud of it—and certain that it’s true—that they have to coerce everyone to agree with ‘em.
Just the gender issue, the economy, etc., etc.
A kind of “Grifters of the World unite…under our big tent….”
– – – – – – –
Not sure that this is related to wealth, currency, net flow or value…but here goes….
But you do know that Russia siezed Crimea in 2014? So how will that “Get ‘er done?”
Does Russia get all of the the other parts of Ukraine that they annexed in 2023/2024 but they don’t actually occupy too? Is that more of your “Get ‘er done?”
When Russia has eliminated all Ukrainians the killing will stop, eh, Boned Looser?
Ben David, there is a limit to the amount of money available. It certainly fluctuates, but the Fed controls how much is available in the economy.
The money supply—measured by aggregates like M1 (cash, checking accounts) and M2 (M1 plus savings accounts, money market funds)—is influenced by the Fed but not rigidly set. As of February 2025, M2 sits around $21 trillion, per the Fed’s latest data, fluctuating with demand and policy shifts. The Fed controls tools like the federal funds rate (currently 4.25-4.5% after a March 12, 2025, hold), open market operations (buying/selling bonds), and reserve requirements (now effectively zero since 2020). These levers let it expand or contract money indirectly.
Normally, the money supply increases through bank loans and decreases when the loan is repaid, but the Fed can directly inject money into the economy, think stimulus checks, indirectly funded through treasury debt. (Still debt, but from a different source). Increasing too much money into the economy too fast produces inflation, something we’re still feeling the effects of post covid.
Sounds like a plan.
==
Why not hold a referendum in the territories occupied by Russia? They can have any municipality which votes for Russia and which is appended to the 2012 border by a contiguous set of municipalities and any surrounded by such.
So, before the trade, the things that were there were two pairs of shoes of different sizes and $5. After the trade, the things that are there are the same two pairs of shoes, on different feet, and the same $5, in a different wallet.
Both us got richer; we each saw an increase in value. The amount of stuff didn’t change, it’s just in different hands. But you would go further and say that you had a “trade deficit” of $5. – Niketas C.
Everything else being equal, the net worth of the one who gave a pair of shoes and $5 for a pair of shoes has gone down.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.
Did you catch this?
== https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/03/hunter-biden-has-had-secret-service.html
==
Years ago, I saw on C-Span a talk given by Steve Ford. He said he was playing chess with his guards on 20 January 1977. At noon, they all said goodbye and left. For 29 months and 11 days, they’d been following him around. Then he was there in his apartment alone. That the 43 year old Ashley Biden had 13 agents assigned to her (two or three agents, round the clock) is a scandal. (Bess Truman at age 92 was assigned one agent a shift, who sat in a parked car outside her house).
==
Please note that Jacqueline Onassis shlepped around Manhattan from 1975 to her death with no more security than that provided by the doorman of her building. The Nixons gave up their detail in 1986. Here’s a possible rule: on departing office, you and your household receive a detail for 12 years. The rest of your brood gets nothing.
Ceasefire ends: IDF and Shin Bet conduct extensive strikes on Hamas targets
Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Katz instruct the IDF to act forcefully against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Dozens of targets struck from the air. Educational activity in communities near Gaza cancelled.
Niketas C.,
Let’s leave the trade deficit aside because it’s a distraction, other than highlighting we have a problem with our export/import relationship.
It’s possible we produce nothing a trading partner wants to buy. That’s going to be a problem, but more likely the country we’re trading with are using protectionist tariffs as a tool to protect their industries.
Trump (or a surrogate) has said more than once we would welcome zero tariffs, leaving aside targeted tariffs for industries we view as vital for economic/military security.
But the larger picture is raising enough revenue for the government and providing a expanding job base of good paying (based on the local economy) jobs.
We need to cut $1.5 trillion in federal spending– or raise revenue. Trump is seeking to expand the economy by reshoring jobs, increase production of domestic products that can increase exports and expanded jobs base that will provide revenue at the local and national level.
The alternative is to increase income taxes, or corporate rates (though the majority of tax revenue is from individual income taxes).
From David Foster’s recent posting:
“One point that is not well enough understood: process innovation is as important as product innovation. The manufacturing innovations of Matthew Boulton and John Wilkinson were as important for the success of the steam engine as were James Watt’s design innovations. In the case of the Model T Ford, the process innovations which allowed production at low and continuously-declining cost were perhaps even more important than the design of the car itself.
The idea of a polarity between ‘High-Tech’ and Manufacturing is unhelpful to clear thinking about policy.”
That is absolutely valid in two ways in particular:
1) When you look at it deeply enough, “manufacturing” is essentially the use if information in the manipulation of materials to make goods, sold as goods directly or to support services. That information might be in the head of an experienced craftsman initially, but today is contained in the programming of automated equipment, etc., but discovered and provided by the programmer, et al.
2) the big push for advancing the quality (and reliability) of manufactured goods in the 70’s and later, following the Japanese push for improving the reputation of their imported goods, showed that if you study and understand the parameters of the process well enough and can control them appropriately (deep attention where required, less attention in less critical areas), you can consistently make something of high quality all of the time! This is also what Philip Crosby meant when he said that “quality is free”, since it costs less to make it right the first time than fix it later or lose business due to a poor reputation.
These aspects are somewhat combined when the product design is made in part to be easily manufacturable (aka producible), testable, maintainable, and supportable, in addition to achieving the requirements of the anticipated end user/customer.
@Brian E:Let’s leave the trade deficit aside because it’s a distraction, other than highlighting we have a problem with our export/import relationship.
I don’t agree, because you can’t explain the thing I challenged you to explain:
…it doesn’t seem that a “trade deficit” can be bad… The worst imaginable “trade deficit” would be another country bringing goods to this one, and never taking any goods in return. In that case, our country would obviously be wealthier; we’d be getting something for nothing. Since the worst possible trade deficit makes us richer, it’s hard to see how a lesser trade deficit makes us poorer, and I’ve never seen anyone make the mathematical proof that there’s a less bad trade deficit that reverses the sign of the change in wealth from trade…
Since you can’t even show it’s a problem, I don’t see any reason to think you have a valid solution.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check. You are saying that when you buy a house or a car you are now poorer because you can’t spend a house or a car….
the country we’re trading with are using protectionist tariffs as a tool to protect their industries
larger picture is raising enough revenue for the government and providing a expanding job base of good paying (based on the local economy) jobs
Hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions, check. None of these things addressed what I said. You can’t show that a trade deficit actually makes a country poorer, all you can do is confuse “wealth” with “money” and fog the issue with words. But the mistake you are making is really obvious: you are saying that whoever buys something is poorer and whoever sells something is richer. You are equating the net flow of currency with the total change in value. Currency is only part of what changes hands in a value-creating transaction.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context. – Me
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check. You are saying that when you buy a house or a car you are now poorer because you can’t spend a house or a car…. – Niketas C
I need your definition of wealth, because what you wrote makes no sense. I thought we were taking about trading commodities. And as far as I know shoes are a depreciating asset, so I’m not sure how they’re supposed to make you richer.
I get you like to argue, but you’re not making sense. And no I wasn’t conflating currency with wealth.
But yes, I think I can make the case that over time trade deficits are harmful to a country.
A job the Biden administration wouldn’t do.
U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the orbital lab ISS for nine months. They were supposed to come back last July 4th but problems with the Boeing Starliner prevented that.
Kinda brings tears to my eyes. I’ve been low-key worrying about Butch and Suni for months now, imagining what it would be like to stuck in space with no way home unless someone on Earth gets it together to come for me.
So Elon and SpaceX to the rescue!
With a little astronaut humor too.
__________________________________
‘Alien’ encounter: ISS crew member plays joke as SpaceX team arrives
Even astronauts have a sense of humor, as shown during NASA’s Crew-10 docking on the International Space Station (ISS), when they were met by an “alien” early Sunday morning.
Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner wore an alien mask while welcoming four newcomers after their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the station at 12:04 a.m., about 29 hours after launching at 7:03 p.m. on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
While ISS crew members were preparing the capsule for deboarding, Vagner could be seen floating around while wearing a mask, a hoodie, pants and socks during the “lighthearted moment,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
Musk and Trump say that the Biden administration prevented a SpaceX rescue because it would have boosted Trump’s election chances.
I don’t know, though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
Great set of comments about trade and money. Brings out different ways of looking at the “same” thing.
Niketas Choniates on March 17, 2025 at 2:10 pm said:
“Unless “wealth” and “currency” are being confused (or deliberately conflated), it doesn’t seem that a “trade deficit” can be bad. It’s a term created to SOUND bad.
[…] In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value.”
Yes, exactly! And trade (foreign or domestic) often has a very subjective (to minor subjective) aspect to it. Your example of shoes is good in that we value well fitting shoes over poor fitting ones, even when they cost the same and are equivalent in any other ways that matter to us (and also as you suggest even with the addition of $5 to the transaction). Such subjectivity is also pretty abstract and very hard to capture in a meaningful “value accounting”, except perhaps at some macro economic level where the subjectivity gets sort of homogenized. [See below about Brian E at 8:40.] Hayek basically claimed that the pricing signal was the best info we had available about that assessment of relative value.
However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on, in whatever legal transaction he chooses.
I might misunderstand him, but perhaps Brian E at 2:50 pm has a similar idea with “Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.” Net worth could be money value or reputational value, which is of course the trust that makes a given money work.
Brian E on March 17, 2025 at 8:02 pm: somewhere I read that the vast bulk of money in circulation comes from commercial or private sector banking making loans as money “out of thin air”, several fold greater than the amount of money the Fed also “creates”. The part of this process I am not yet clear on is the real role that reserve requirements play in this, if any? Are the banks truly constrained by legal reserve requirements or by the anticipated creditworthiness of their borrowers?
Brian E on March 17, 2025 at 8:40 pm:
“Everything else being equal, the net worth of the one who gave a pair of shoes and $5 for a pair of shoes has gone down.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.”
It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth. I am seeing some elements of the Marxist labor theory of value here, which was deeply flawed for ignoring other elements of value being added during industrialization, often by the “capitalists”. If both parties are satisfied with the net value of the transaction [an abstract feeling on their part] it does not matter what form of money or goods they (legally or morally) exchanged to achieve it.
But your comment at 10:04pm [is it really midnight already!!??] is setting aside why we are having this discussion. Ideally we have no tariff trade barriers, full and proper specialization and trade, and no mercantilist nonsense by the CCP with IP theft, currency manipulations, trying to monopolize elements of selected supply chains, etc. But if Trump’s assertions about the relative barriers implemented by our allies is true, and I have not seen anyone dispute his numbers (although he could well be wrong or “mistaken” for effect), then the argument you make to enhance our domestic industry and national security is a valid goal. It is probably going to be much more complicated to achieve than he or we can envision.
Somewhere else I read that the dollar as the global reserve currency also plays into some of this, and Vance et al. now want to devalue the dollar to adjust the import/export cost numbers to our favor, but in doing so they have to balance that against reducing global incentives to use $’s as the reserve currency.
Coming late to the party, I hope I have not been too muddled in my comments. I now see I almost missed the last two comments by Niketas and Brian.
But Brian at 11:03: “I can make the case that over time trade deficits are harmful to a country.”
I believe that that case can be made, but I concur with Niketas that I don’t yet see where you have done that.
Peace.
Oh, I almost forgot. This may be mildly or indirectly relevant to the above discussion.
Yesterday I came across a short essay/ book review on EconLib by Arnold Kling, addressing an author’s attempt to examine the merits and limits of the gold standard, fiat money, and Bitcoin: https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klingstablemoney.html
The end result did not fully satisfy Kling, but he thought it a useful examination of some of the issues. Perhaps some of you here will also find the book review and/or the actual book useful or interesting.
@Banned Lizard
Trump weighs recognizing Crimea as Russian territory in bid to end war
Sounds like a plan.
It sounds like a plan all right, but frankly a wrongheaded and ineffectual plan.
Let’s pull the trigger, stop the killing, and git’er done!
There are a few problems with this logic.
Firstly: I can think of only one post-Soviet conflict involving Putin where the killing actually stopped. That’s in Transnistria, and it was by far the shortest and least bloody of the conflicts involved, with the active shooting being over and done in 1991 with the result of a Russian Army basically squatting on the relevant territory with the help of a separatist Neo-Soviet dictatorship, with an embattled Moldova forced to admit it had no resources to evict them or even defend their own people from things like the threatened bombardment of their capitol city. Resulting in multiple years of Lucy Kicks the Football offers of negotiations and so forth that have not gotten many people killed yet.
Everywhere else the result is worse.
Including Ukraine.
Speaking of which, people ignore that the Ukrainians and the various Western Allies (including those oh so butch and bullish EU members) did about the closest thing to acknowledging Crimea as Russian territory by excluding it from most of the limitations on Russian and Separatist forces in the Minsk Agreements and Zelenskyy’s declaration he would seek to only obtain the return of Crimea diplomatically in 2020, along with a host of other things like a referendum to divide the Donbas.
That didn’t work. The killing continued. Which is one reason why by mid 2021 Zelenskyy had to publicly walk that back.
We’ve been playing this particularly lethal ring around the rosie for a long time.
Unrelated, but Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone. And I admit Padraig is a truly fascinating figure that I wish I knew more about. I tend to focus my research on more recent times (from the 1500s onwards, and especially from the Victorian era to now), but he and the sort of post-Roman early Medieval era has really fascinated me. Fun fact: he was involved in his own financial scandal where he and his mission were accused of embezzlement, and he had to write a testimony trying to explain himself. It’s one of the documents we have from his own hand.
The other being a letter to the soldiers of “Coroticus” the King of the Romano-British Kingdom of Alt Clut, in which he condemned them for enslaving Christians in their raids.
That said, the idea that there is “dispute” about whether he was the “first significant” Christian missionary in Ireland is probably not true, we have very solid evidence that Christianity had a presence in Ireland decades before Padraig’s birth (let alone his kidnapping and enslavement and then escape to Britain before returning). Nothing like a majority presence mind, but enough we can be pretty sure the Pope appointed a Bishop and Missionary (Palladius) and Ireland had even begun to have some native-born saints like St. Columba.
Padraig would have been fairly early to the story (overlapping with the sort of first or second generation of monastery builders) but would have been viewed as something of a Johnny-come-Lately by the established clerical authorities.
I’ve considered trying to write a sort of Hagiographic/Apologetic biographical historical fiction historical fantasy about Padraig, and I have a few ideas about it. But I confess that the politics and history of this era are daunting even for me, and the myths even more so. I’d definitely need to do more research in order to have anything like confidence I’d be able to do justice to it. That said, I DO think I have a pretty good idea on how to explain/justify the Snakes thing (in spite of it being allegorical in general, probably not dating back to Padraig’s own time, and not being strictly true in either of the usual sense – there being no native snakes the animals for Padraig to drive off, and Irish Paganism not being ended for generations after his death).
Namely in the form of a particularly brutal, tyrannical Pagan warlord (probably based somewhere in the Southeast) who while having made his start by piracy and maritime trading (indeed his goons might even be the ones to have captured Padraig in this case) has ambitions to bring the rest of the island and possibly more under his power as a new, stronger kind of High King. And who is not at all above trying to use hook and crook to do so, especially as he claims to be favored by the divine (tentatively, likely claims to be a favorite of Cernunos, God of the Hunt), which he can supposedly show by way of “godly emissaries” that grant him favor and his enemies death in strange and terrifying fashion when he does not simply have his Fianna (roving warrior nobles) or other troops kill them.
After all, it is true that there have been no snakes on Ireland for thousands of years, but they ARE very much present on the continent… and you can kind of guess how this might go…
Still very early in concept.
“The worst imaginable “trade deficit” would be another country bringing goods to this one, and never taking any goods in return. In that case, our country would obviously be wealthier; we’d be getting something for nothing. Since the worst possible trade deficit makes us richer, it’s hard to see how a lesser trade deficit makes us poorer, and I’ve never seen anyone make the mathematical proof that there’s a less bad trade deficit that reverses the sign of the change in wealth from trade, I’ve just seen hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions; favorite ones being that manufacturing and agriculture are somehow more healthy or virtuous, or that fiat currency is the problem, or that we’re being “financialized”.” – Niketas C.
Apparently, you’re living in another world, an illusionary world where stock prices are the economy. President Trump is working in the real world, where people work for a living.
“In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value.” – Niketas C.
No what’s being exchanged is two pairs of shoes.
“However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on.” – R2L
I would say we haven’t done a particularly good job at that. While this is important, not just globally but domestically as well. But I’m not sure how value enters into trade relationships. Value is something that’s added at point of purchase. If you’re saying that the trade imbalance between Europe and the US is reflected in the underlying value of the goods being exchanged, that’s a concept I’ve never heard before.
What I see as the problem with that imbalance is our manufacturing/distribution is being underutilized in contrast to the trading partner.
“It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth.” – R2L
Net Worth=Assets-Liabilities.
“Somewhere else I read that the dollar as the global reserve currency also plays into some of this, and Vance et al. now want to devalue the dollar to adjust the import/export cost numbers to our favor, but in doing so they have to balance that against reducing global incentives to use $’s as the reserve currency.” – R2L
I find that hard to believe that Vance would consider that as a solution, given his background. That isn’t a solution. I would be interested in the source for that.
=======
I’ve tried to parse out the left’s solution to our deficit problem. The left wants lots of unskilled/low cost labor for a couple of reasons. Lowers the cost of goods as it suppresses labor costs. But the left isn’t focused on exports as a strategy, but relies on imports to keep cost of living affordable– with government payments to make up the difference between low wages and affordability.
Which leads to large deficits. As I said the left isn’t concerned with exports- so high corporate taxes and high taxes on the upper class also isn’t a concern.
The difference can be made up with tapping the last untaxed pool of money– unrealized capital gains. Since the majority of Americans don’t have a large portion of their assets in equities, they will likely view this as the golden egg. Tapping into that would seem to given an nearly unlimited supply of taxes to fund all sorts of equitable solutions.
So the tradeoff is a hollowing out of exports and a compliant Fed that makes decisions to enhance share price over it’s stated purpose of employment/inflation. We’re already partially on our way to this goal, with subsidized food, housing and healthcare. They were working on free secondary education and reparations to add some additional spending money to the mix.
The fact this isn’t sustainable will be dealt with in the future– sort of how our government debt is being dealt with– we’ll fix it in the future.
The alternative to this scenario is President Trump’s attempt to increase the size of the economy through his deregulation/energy/trade policies.
I am not an economist, nor do I play one on television, but one aspect of the shoe trade is that when the exchange includes $5 to sweeten the deal the receiver of the cash is better off in some way because money is fungible, but shoes aren’t.
@ Turtler in re Patrick and the Snakes: one explanation I’ve seen is symbolical, in that snakes represent Lucifer and his minions, which would be pagans at the time, and Patrick helped drive them out of the country (IOW convert them).
Our local Welsh society, among others, capitalizes on his origin in Britain, some say in the area now denoted Wales, and walk in St Paddy’s Day parades with banners proclaiming “St Patrick was a Welshman.”
I send cards on The Day because my heritage includes Welsh and Irish: a two-fer!
@BrianE:Apparently, you’re living in another world, an illusionary world where stock prices are the economy.
Making up opinions from imaginary people, not present here, and attributing them to me, does not cover for your inability to show that a “trade deficit” somehow makes a country poorer.
@AesopFan:I am not an economist, nor do I play one on television, but one aspect of the shoe trade is that when the exchange includes $5 to sweeten the deal the receiver of the cash is better off in some way because money is fungible, but shoes aren’t.
There is no question that someone who got the shoes he wanted and $5 has got more than that SAME person would if he only got the shoes he wanted. But you have no way to know if both participants in the trade got the same increase in value. It depends on how much each side valued that $5 and the shoes. It is not true that everyone values money and goods to the same extent in every transaction.
As a side note, money is only fungible when we agree it is. There’s nothing inherently fungible about it. If you disagree, try paying for your groceries with a combination of euros, yuan, and dollars; or paying with cash when a shop only takes cards.
But think of a situation where you buy from someone who also buys from you. Suppose you sell shoes and I sell printer ink. Once day I happen to buy shoes from you for $100 and you buy printer ink from me for $90 dollars.
The net flow of currency is $10 to you; this would be the “trade deficit”. But the change in value to both of us is not that I am $10 poorer and you are $10 richer.
I got shoes, which I wanted more than I wanted my $100, and you got rid of shoes which you wanted less than you wanted my $100. We both got richer. Then you bought printer ink which you wanted more than your $90 and which I wanted less than your $90. We both got richer again.
My lowest value outcome was to be stuck with my printer ink, my $100, and no shoes. Your lowest value outcome was to be stuck with your shoes and your $90 and no printer ink. We both got outcomes we valued higher, and so both got richer. (Potentially there could have been different outcomes we liked even better, if the dollar amounts were different.) The two positive changes we each got do not magically add up to a negative change for one of us.
But the Brian E logic (ok not to blame him, it’s not uncommon) is that I was better off with my lowest-value outcome because the net flow of money was $10 from me. That’s because his fallacy is to identify the net flow of currency with the net change in value for each participant–he’s leaving out a big chunk of the accounting. To use his “net worth” terminology, he is not counting change in assets, only the cash flow…
If his logic were correct, then trade is always somebody getting exploited and nothing is valuable but money.
Brian E, it is amazing how fast time flies. I struggled to recall when I saw that article, which I then found I had copied to MS Word on 3/4/25, along with rereading an older article I found last August. Two weeks gone “just like that”. Money may be valuable to us, but many pundits and philosophers suggest that time is even more so, given we only have so much of it.
And to prime the intellectual pump, here is an extract that summarizes his message, maybe:
“The Trump administration has three objectives related to America’s position in the international monetary system. [I converted prose to bullet listing for improved clarity]
[1] First, it wants to maintain but reduce the financial burdens associated with the U.S.’s leading role.
[2] Second, it wants to get our national debt on a more sustainable path.
[3] Third, it wants to restore America’s industrial capacity.
These objectives are coherent only if one understands the global financial system. The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and the U.S. Treasury security is the global reserve asset. This means, respectively, that the dollar is the primary currency used in international trade, and that foreign central banks and other institutions store wealth in terms of dollars with Treasury securities.
America’s central role in the world economy benefits us in several ways. It relaxes constraints on the federal government’s ability to borrow, for example, and allows Washington to use financial sanctions against foreign enemies rather than military force.
But these benefits come with costs. One such cost is that the dollar, because of its reserve status, tends to be overvalued. This makes foreign goods cheaper for U.S. consumers, but it also makes foreign labor and production cheaper for reasons unrelated to comparative advantage—a dynamic that has hollowed out America’s industrial base.
Another consequence of America’s role in the system is that it encourages us to accumulate debt. As foreign countries’ economies grow, so does their demand for reserves. If the U.S. doesn’t supply enough debt to meet that growing demand, our borrowing costs decline, which motivates politicians to run larger deficits.”
Right now I figure I have maybe a 70% understanding of these things, so welcome any clarifying discussion.
Having said what a “trade deficit” doesn’t mean, which is to say making a country poorer, I should probably say what it DOES mean. It means somebody somewhere is trading currencies.
If I’m importing something from the UK I might pay in dollars, but more likely they want pounds. I have to trade my dollars to someone who has pounds. That entity is always being offered currency exchanges, and when dollars are in high demand you can get a lot of pounds for them and when dollars are in low demand you don’t get as many. The relative price between currencies can affect the volume of foreign trade. Some kind of equilibrium is struck between the effect of the volume of foreign trade and the effect of the currency exchanges.
When I buy something from a seller in the UK, my trade deficit is still measured in dollars, but that I doesn’t mean I actually send dollars out of the country. In many cases it does, but the overall trade deficit implies that if dollars ever leave, the dollars eventually come back somehow; through investment, lending, purchasing American products, or simply by being exchanged for other currencies. Alternatively, importers and exporters in other countries may use the dollars to settle their own transactions with each other and in fact this also happens. In addition, people in other countries may simply be stockpiling the dollars to spend later and of course this also happens, but in the end that’s a time-delayed version of one of the other alternatives.
Brian’s response to my comment:
“It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth.” – R2L
“Net Worth=Assets-Liabilities.
But I am adding or exploring “value” beyond pure $ pricing, and assets and liabilities are designated in $’s. This is of course abstract and subjective. For NC’s fictional trader, if he really wanted black shoes badly enough, he would have potentially had to offer even more than $5. Following Trump’s negotiating strategy, the initial “demand” should have been for the shoes + $1000. That bid would be rejected and eventually they get down to shoes + (say) $10 and an “equitable” trade that both parties can live with. At a $5 premium, someone left money on the table vs. what the traders valued in reality.
I have to admit that I struggle to understand double entry bookkeeping. I have never had a course in that and trying to pick it up on my own, I am probably failing to truly understand and adopt a neutral approach for an entry being “two sides of the same coin”. I still want to see assets as positive and liabilities as negative. Sigh.
In rereading Brian E on March 18, 2025 at 2:09 pm:
“However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on.” – R2L
“I would say we haven’t done a particularly good job at that. While this is important, not just globally but domestically as well. But I’m not sure how value enters into trade relationships. Value is something that’s added at point of purchase.”
But since the $ is still the global reserve currency [under attack but still dominant], we have done a rather better than expected job at finessing our reputation via our liberty and prosperity as the “final” resting place where people put their money version of their wealth. Clearly that could change, and I am not sure if we would end up being better or worse off as a result. Presumably pros and cons either way.
My perception is that for a given exchange, value is discovered or determined or made public at the point of completing the transaction, but the value resides in each trader’s personal (and often subjective) preferences until the equilibrium balancing price is agreed to. And if the negotiation was done poorly, someone may have obtained or retained even greater personal value than the price value. [Or is this a conversation about language nit picking?]
Peace.
@AesopFan
@ Turtler in re Patrick and the Snakes: one explanation I’ve seen is symbolical, in that snakes represent Lucifer and his minions, which would be pagans at the time, and Patrick helped drive them out of the country (IOW convert them).
Oh yeah, that was definitely the original intent behind it. Which I tried to allude to with the fictional villain’s leanings (pagan and evil even by the standards of the time) and how he is importing/smuggling the snakes in by his boats. But the symbolic connection between Lucifer and Serpents is old and goes all the way back to the Bible.
Our local Welsh society, among others, capitalizes on his origin in Britain, some say in the area now denoted Wales, and walk in St Paddy’s Day parades with banners proclaiming “St Patrick was a Welshman.”
I send cards on The Day because my heritage includes Welsh and Irish: a two-fer!
Indeed, and I would love to see it at some point. Brythonic-Welsh history and culture fascinates me.
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At long last Ronen Bar is about to be fired, over a year too late:
https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-to-seek-dismissal-of-shin-bet-director/
And to demonstrate the worse bureaucratic condition of Israeli politics compared to the US, their Attorney-General says to the PM and Knesset in effect “Stop! You can’t fire him! Because I say you can’t!”
Sing it with “em, people:
Hey, hey, ho, ho, Baharav-Miara has got to go!
New post, in which I respond the the frequently-made assertion that manufacturing doesn’t matter all that much and that we should focus on ‘high-tech’ instead.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73514.html
I think with few exceptions in the occidental world, a country’s enemies are to be found in its chattering classes:
==
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/de-colonizing-shakespeare-experts-blame-white-supremacy-for-playwright-s-fame-as-hometown-museum-vows-change/ar-AA1B2ea3
==
Quite frustrating as usual in that the perpetrators are never named. The one person named does not work there. She’s a faculty snot at Birmingham City University (not the University of Birmingham). The executive director left in November and the position is vacant. The chairman of the board is an elderly and well-connected homewrecker known by her former courtesy title ‘Lady Cobham’, aka the ‘quango queen’.
27% – MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki calls out Dems low favorability – Video UPDATED with more winning!!!
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/03/27-msnbcs-steve-kornacki-calls-out-dems.html
ps. could you please add CC to your blogroll? thanks!
Oh never mind
https://x.com/StephenM/status/1901313739242062149
Whether it’s AutoPen-Apocalypse or AutoPen-Armageddon it will be hilarious fun to watch the riots which ensue.
Boasberg is atrocious.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
And for those who haven’t quite “gotten it” yet….
The Orwellian progessive view of Free Speech:
https://evebarlow.substack.com/p/shamrocks-and-shenanigans
H/T Powerline blog.
I guess they gotta keep those lies comin’…
Kind of an “identity” thang, I guess.
Neo has yet to offer her assessment of how it could be that the premier substacker in the United States is one Heather Cox Richardson. For an assessment of one of Richardson’s more recent books:
==
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/in-the-absence-of-factual-truth/
That’s quite a link.
What a KOOK.
(Actually, I believe that the answer to your query—“…how it could be that…”—is in the last paragraph of the excellent dissection:
)
[Emphasis mine; Barry M.]
One hopes that the current administration and those that follow in its steps will be able to rally, pinpoint and prioritize fixing the most lethal threats and heal the pervasive and profound sickness.
Heather Cox Richardson another progressive fabulist/fraudster? Shocked!
Very windy here in CO, not so cold, but the wind. chill is.
So, I just made myself a bowl of Irish Oatmeal.
Tonight, Corned Beef, Cabbage, Colcannon.
Got the Colcannon recipe from a cooking class, teacher got it from her Grandmother.
Basically, here it is
Butter, Mashed Potatoes, Butter, Kale – sweated in Butter, Butter, Leaks – cooked in heavy Cream, Butter.
Category error is an art
https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/17/the-era-of-presuming-liberal-moral-superiority-is-over/
Shakespeare was about other cultures like cinthios tales of venice that inspired othello, holinsheds tales about the scottish play the danish chronicles et al
On “decolonizing” Shakespeare, Glenn Reynolds comments at Instapundit: “When you seek to suppress a country’s native culture, you’re not decolonizing it. You’re colonizing it.”
@SHIREHOME:Colcannon
I guess we have that about once a week; easy way to get kids to eat kale.
There’s a song about it. Maybe more than one, but I know of this one.
so what about the other 150 years, the truth about heathers’ little screed is the reverse, the Depression was the Progs, ‘never letting a crisis go to waste’ for their own reason, the 1965 iteration, was another opportunity, because tall man Goldwater, of course they blame the war, as a failure to expand the government more, an opportunity they really had under obama, although the Camel’s nose was under the tent, with Clinton, as well, of course their solutions, like the CRA revisions only cause more crises down the road, Obamacare didn’t really solve the problem of insurance, neither did the ARRA solve shortfalls in infrastructure, it wasn’t meant to, it was to allow the government to take over financial institutions even some manufacturing concerns like auto companies,
consortium like black rock spread the so called ‘woke
virus, inside corporate America, a way to’fundamentally transform’ the country from within,
the most recent experiments seems to have been employed to create this new
blue majority, that teixeira predicted, through mass immigration, that was Jeffrey Sach’s little known recipe, from 2001,
Here’s a sampling of what has been posted today by a grassroots democrat just to confirm the nuttiness is not limited to the higher ups in the party. This is not in any way unusual; they seem to actually believe this. When a large percentage of the public is in such a disturbed mental state, I assume violence can’t be far behind.
“The Panama Canal was just an excuse to invade Panama
The tariffs were just a way to soften up Canada and Mexico before invading them both;
National Security was just an excuse to invade Greenland;
The Alien Enemies Act was just an excuse to detain Canadians and British citizens
The attacks on universities and the free press were just a way to scare the public into silence and submission before calling for Martial Law and instituting a draft
The President is deeply compromised. Trump does not work for the American people. He works for Elon Musk.
Bottom line: Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s Russian handler, and he is working alongside JD Vance to destroy Europe, and with Trump to end democracy, abolish the Constitutional Republic, and invade at least all of Central and North America”
Paranoia strikes deep, as the song goes.
Macron is calling for European countries to stop relying and buying US Military gear. I say go for it
I was watching the real world as one of my granddaughter’s volleyball team won the silver bracket at a fairly large tournament this weekend. I have three granddaughters currently playing club volleyball, soon to be four. Both my daughters played volleyball into college, so it was inevitable.
But back to the virtual world. Don Boudreaux has been a free trade advocate for years. I would have more respect for his positions, if his hypotheticals and statistics included tempering data that represent both the positive and negatives to unfettered free trade.
Case in point. One of his posts points out that a trade deficit totaling over $20 trillion since 1975 hasn’t reduced American’s net worth. And he shows that by the growth of American’s net worth over the years to an astounding $1.2 million. Ignoring monetary inflation, that figure includes an inflated stock market.
While the stock market may be valued at $62 trillion, that’s an imaginary number. Suppose everyone decided to sell their shares at the same time. What would be the total sold value?
In the case of a market crash, the upper income brackets would be hardest hit.
The bottom 50% of American’s only has 13% of their net worth in stocks.
The middle 40% has 20-25% of their net worth in stocks.
The top 10% has 35-40% in stocks while the top 1% has over 50% in stocks.
Since some/much of the gains in the market has benefited with “free” trade and the outsourcing of American production to cheap labor countries, it stands to reason they would have the most to lose if we adopted a reciprocal trade standard to tariffs, along with targeted tariffs on industries vital to economic and military security.
I see two goals to Trump’s trade agenda. Produce more internal economic activity that raise revenue to the government without punitive taxes that would stifle that activity, and create more good paying jobs for that bottom 50% of Americans most left behind by the policies of the last 30-40 years.
As to Phil Gramm, his policies enacted in the late 90’s proved wrong and contributed (specifically CDS) to the Great Recession, along with the FED, CRA, Fannie and a whole host of bad policy.
So I don’t think either of these economists should be our guide for economic policies going forward.
Boudreaux’s blog:
https://cafehayek.com/
”Macron is calling for European countries to stop relying and buying US Military gear. I say go for it”
How does making Europe set up a heavily subsidized competitor to our largest exporting industry make America better?
Unless “wealth” and “currency” are being confused (or deliberately conflated), it doesn’t seem that a “trade deficit” can be bad. It’s a term created to SOUND bad.
The worst imaginable “trade deficit” would be another country bringing goods to this one, and never taking any goods in return. In that case, our country would obviously be wealthier; we’d be getting something for nothing. Since the worst possible trade deficit makes us richer, it’s hard to see how a lesser trade deficit makes us poorer, and I’ve never seen anyone make the mathematical proof that there’s a less bad trade deficit that reverses the sign of the change in wealth from trade, I’ve just seen hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions; favorite ones being that manufacturing and agriculture are somehow more healthy or virtuous, or that fiat currency is the problem, or that we’re being “financialized”.
Of course, the other country would be taking currency of some kind in exchange, but currency is not wealth, which is why I’m pretty sure that those who say trade deficits make us somehow poorer are confusing or conflating currency and wealth, if not making some other error. The Spanish Empire improverished itself by importing gold and silver from the Americas, to the point of being proverbial: “In Spain everything is expensive except gold and silver”.
In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value. If I have a pair of shoes that I can’t wear, and you have a pair that you can’t wear, and we trade, and now we both have shoes that fit, then we have both got richer even though the number of shoes and the identities of the people are still the same.
Few of us complain of our trade deficits with our grocery stores: not once has any store I patronized ever purchased anything from me, yet I keep giving them money and they keep giving me stuff. Clearly I’m getting screwed…
Niketas, let’s use your scenario and say that Freedonia exports $100 billion of goods to us, and buys nothing from us, which would leave us with a $100 billion trade deficit. But Freedonia would have $100 billion of our currency. Currency is not unlimited. We can certainly make more of it, but that raises our indebtedness.
Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.
Freedonia could buy an American company with that $100 billion or invest it in the stock market, which would mean the wealth of the country remained static, but each year that occurs and we ship $100 billion in currency to Freedonia to buy that $100 billion of goods shipped to the country, eventually we run out of currency, unless we borrow another $100 billion.
We could always just print more of the currency we use– dollars, but that would debase/deflate it’s value.
Either way, the net worth of the country declines.
I agree with your analogy of trading shoes, but the effect is a trade deficit of zero.
Here’s is Boudreaux’s post on trade deficits and net worth.
A sample of why I find Boudreaux’s economics of diminished value.
He needs to account for the the times it does result in a $1 decrease in Americans’ net worth.
Do U.S. Trade Deficits Reduce Americans’ Net Worth?
https://cafehayek.com/2025/03/dd-11.html
RE: “There will always be an England.”–Notes from England’s cultural suicide watch–
England’s Shakespeare National Trust has now determined that Shakespeare and all his works, even his historic house, are instances of
of “White European Supremacy,” and will have to be “decolonized.”*
* See https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/the_shakespeare_national_trust_determines_that_shakespeare_is_not_to_be.html
Brian E…I responded to the Boudreaux & Gramm column here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73514.html
Niketas…”Few of us complain of our trade deficits with our grocery stores: not once has any store I patronized ever purchased anything from me, yet I keep giving them money and they keep giving me stuff.”
If the only grocery store in range was run by somebody that was hostile to you and threatened to cut off your groceries if you did something he didn’t like, would that still be okay with your?
David Foster, I read your post about the WSJ opinion piece, but I didn’t read the original story, since it’s behind a paywall, so I could only comment on Boudreaux’s positions on trade based on his blog.
I enjoy reading your posts and really like the variety of comments you produce, it’s great to read reactions from all types of perspectives.
As to “high tech”, so they really mean the Magnificent 7 on Wall St?
@Brian E:Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check, with bonus contradiction between one clause and the next.
@David Foster:If the only grocery store in range was run by somebody that was hostile to you…
Arguing about auxiliary assumptions, check.
Brian E…it would be nice to hear what they really do mean by ‘high-tech’…There wasn’t really all that much to the original story. They object to Trump’s use of the McKinley analogy, saying:
“Mr. Trump’s policy turns the traditional meaning of reciprocal trade on its head. He wants to achieve reciprocity only by raising tariffs, almost certainly triggering retaliation. Reciprocal trade policy as envisioned by President William McKinley, whom Mr. Trump often cites as his role model, recognized that by the dawn of the 20th century America had emerged as an economic colossus capable of producing an abundance of products that could be profitably exported. As McKinley explained, “the expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable.”
McKinley’s reciprocal trade policy was aimed at opening markets for U.S. products with agreements that lowered tariffs on imported products proportionately as other countries lowered theirs on U.S. products. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used reciprocal trade policies to back the world out of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. His successors used reciprocal trade to lift the majority of the world’s population out of poverty and achieve 75 years of peace and prosperity.”
I think it’s odd to focus *only* on trade as the engine of lifting much of the world’s population out of poverty…technology had a lot to do with it (with a broad definition of ‘technology’, not just ‘computer stuff’) as did stable legal systems and the relative absence of feudal or regulatory barriers.
It’s important to distinguish between trade which reflects the inherent comparative advantage of various locations (raising oranges in Spain, for example) versus trade which is mainly about wage and regulatory arbitrage.
Niketas, what is your definition of wealth and net worth.
David Foster, Trump has made it very clear the imposition of reciprocal tariffs is to encourage/force the trading partner to reduce their tariff, at which point we will reciprocate.
That does align with McKinley’s policies.
He does talk about tariffs as a tool to raise revenue, but that, IMO, is just to reinforce that we’ll maintain a tariff if the trading partner agrees to reduce theirs.
It’s my understanding our trading partners already, and for years, have had protective tariffs on our goods, or use other trade barriers. Reciprocal tariffs may not be a perfect remedy, but it will get their attention.
Brian E:
But Freedonia would have $100 billion of our currency. Currency is not unlimited. We can certainly make more of it, but that raises our indebtedness.
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I do not understand when people talk like this about “currency”.
Another one is “the money supply”.
These terms seems like mental relics from when dollar bills were backed by gold.
My entire life has been lived in fiat currency.
I get my salary and pay most of my bills and purchases electronically. Haven’t had a printed salary check for or been paid in cash for decades. I use a check when I want a record of a transaction in addition to my credit card statement.
In what way is this “currency” not unlimited – how is it related in any way to the government printing bills, loaning money, or other people borrowing money and holding bills?
Fiat currency is scrip with fancy printing and a bit more security for actual paper transactions. It is used by people to conduct business with no promises from the government, and no obligations by the government, to cover anything.
The amount of electronic fiat currency in circulation does not seem to me to be “limited” in any way. Unless artificially by a central bank.
What am I missing?
@Brian E:Niketas, what is your definition of wealth and net worth.
If I do that, we’ll spend all day arguing definitions. I think it’s more productive to go to the example where we almost agree:
I agree with your analogy of trading shoes, but the effect is a trade deficit of zero.
OK, let’s include some currency into this and see what happens. Suppose the shoes are identical other than fit and the need is purely fit. A one-to-one trade is easy then, and as you say, the “trade deficit” is zero. I don’t disagree with that.
OK, suppose there’s something different in the need. Suppose you have a pair of wingtips that don’t fit you and I have a different-sized pair that don’t fit me. But suppose our needs are different. Maybe I like brown shoes better and these are black. I might be less inclined to trade with you (rather than with someone else who has what I really want) and you might throw in something else, like $5 let’s say, to give me a reason to trade with you. I agree and we trade.
So, before the trade, the things that were there were two pairs of shoes of different sizes and $5. After the trade, the things that are there are the same two pairs of shoes, on different feet, and the same $5, in a different wallet.
Both us got richer; we each saw an increase in value. The amount of stuff didn’t change, it’s just in different hands. But you would go further and say that you had a “trade deficit” of $5.
I don’t dispute that there is such a thing as “trade deficit” and that it is measured in money. What I dispute is that the “trade deficit” makes you poorer. It’s a thing that is measured, but it is not inherently good or bad. Within national economies individuals and businesses run “trade deficits” with each other all the time. It’s rare not to: I mean I might work to produce electricity for the PUD, and they might power my home, but even in that case where there really is “reciprocal trade” I might not want to get paid in kilowatt-hours instead of money…
To focus on the “trade deficit” is to ignore the increase in value that we each received. You wanted (a pair of shoes that fit) more than you wanted (a pair that doesn’t fit and $5). I wanted (a pair of shoes that fit and $5) more than I wanted (a pair that didn’t fit). We both got what we wanted and we both got more than we had, in terms of our own values. The “trade deficit” is calling attention to one part of the transaction that, in this case, was the least valuable thing involved (it only came up because I wanted brown shoes a little more than the black I traded for), and identifying the change in value of the entire transaction with it.
That’s why I say “confusing/conflating wealth with currency”. Currency is a part of the change in value for both sides in the transaction, but the net flow of currency is not identical to the total change in value.
Niketas,
I salute your energy level.
For physicsguy, a Biden appointee to a top Dept. of Energy physics panel says “white empiricism” undermines the theory of relativity.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/03/17/trust-the-science-even-physics-has-been-infected-by-radical-politics-n3800856
Trump weighs recognizing Crimea as Russian territory in bid to end war
Sounds like a plan. Let’s pull the trigger, stop the killing, and git’er done!
Kate, Democratic Party Lysenkoism is a thing.
It’s their policy. They promote it, push it, boast about it and are tremendously proud of it.
In fact they’re so proud of it—and certain that it’s true—that they have to coerce everyone to agree with ‘em.
Just the gender issue, the economy, etc., etc.
A kind of “Grifters of the World unite…under our big tent….”
– – – – – – –
Not sure that this is related to wealth, currency, net flow or value…but here goes….
‘Musk: Feds Have “Magic Money Computers” That Issue Payments “Out Of Thin Air”’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/musk-feds-have-magic-money-computers-issue-payments-out-thin-air
Oops.
Should be, “…just like the gender issue…”
Boned Looser:
But you do know that Russia siezed Crimea in 2014? So how will that “Get ‘er done?”
Does Russia get all of the the other parts of Ukraine that they annexed in 2023/2024 but they don’t actually occupy too? Is that more of your “Get ‘er done?”
When Russia has eliminated all Ukrainians the killing will stop, eh, Boned Looser?
The New Contemptables.
Looks like Decent Joe was at it again…
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/03/lost-in-space.php
Ben David, there is a limit to the amount of money available. It certainly fluctuates, but the Fed controls how much is available in the economy.
Normally, the money supply increases through bank loans and decreases when the loan is repaid, but the Fed can directly inject money into the economy, think stimulus checks, indirectly funded through treasury debt. (Still debt, but from a different source). Increasing too much money into the economy too fast produces inflation, something we’re still feeling the effects of post covid.
Oh never mind
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1901764182795538542
Sounds like a plan.
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Why not hold a referendum in the territories occupied by Russia? They can have any municipality which votes for Russia and which is appended to the 2012 border by a contiguous set of municipalities and any surrounded by such.
So, before the trade, the things that were there were two pairs of shoes of different sizes and $5. After the trade, the things that are there are the same two pairs of shoes, on different feet, and the same $5, in a different wallet.
Both us got richer; we each saw an increase in value. The amount of stuff didn’t change, it’s just in different hands. But you would go further and say that you had a “trade deficit” of $5. – Niketas C.
Everything else being equal, the net worth of the one who gave a pair of shoes and $5 for a pair of shoes has gone down.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.
Did you catch this?
==
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/03/hunter-biden-has-had-secret-service.html
==
Years ago, I saw on C-Span a talk given by Steve Ford. He said he was playing chess with his guards on 20 January 1977. At noon, they all said goodbye and left. For 29 months and 11 days, they’d been following him around. Then he was there in his apartment alone. That the 43 year old Ashley Biden had 13 agents assigned to her (two or three agents, round the clock) is a scandal. (Bess Truman at age 92 was assigned one agent a shift, who sat in a parked car outside her house).
==
Please note that Jacqueline Onassis shlepped around Manhattan from 1975 to her death with no more security than that provided by the doorman of her building. The Nixons gave up their detail in 1986. Here’s a possible rule: on departing office, you and your household receive a detail for 12 years. The rest of your brood gets nothing.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/405522
Niketas C.,
Let’s leave the trade deficit aside because it’s a distraction, other than highlighting we have a problem with our export/import relationship.
It’s possible we produce nothing a trading partner wants to buy. That’s going to be a problem, but more likely the country we’re trading with are using protectionist tariffs as a tool to protect their industries.
Trump (or a surrogate) has said more than once we would welcome zero tariffs, leaving aside targeted tariffs for industries we view as vital for economic/military security.
But the larger picture is raising enough revenue for the government and providing a expanding job base of good paying (based on the local economy) jobs.
We need to cut $1.5 trillion in federal spending– or raise revenue. Trump is seeking to expand the economy by reshoring jobs, increase production of domestic products that can increase exports and expanded jobs base that will provide revenue at the local and national level.
The alternative is to increase income taxes, or corporate rates (though the majority of tax revenue is from individual income taxes).
From David Foster’s recent posting:
“One point that is not well enough understood: process innovation is as important as product innovation. The manufacturing innovations of Matthew Boulton and John Wilkinson were as important for the success of the steam engine as were James Watt’s design innovations. In the case of the Model T Ford, the process innovations which allowed production at low and continuously-declining cost were perhaps even more important than the design of the car itself.
The idea of a polarity between ‘High-Tech’ and Manufacturing is unhelpful to clear thinking about policy.”
That is absolutely valid in two ways in particular:
1) When you look at it deeply enough, “manufacturing” is essentially the use if information in the manipulation of materials to make goods, sold as goods directly or to support services. That information might be in the head of an experienced craftsman initially, but today is contained in the programming of automated equipment, etc., but discovered and provided by the programmer, et al.
2) the big push for advancing the quality (and reliability) of manufactured goods in the 70’s and later, following the Japanese push for improving the reputation of their imported goods, showed that if you study and understand the parameters of the process well enough and can control them appropriately (deep attention where required, less attention in less critical areas), you can consistently make something of high quality all of the time! This is also what Philip Crosby meant when he said that “quality is free”, since it costs less to make it right the first time than fix it later or lose business due to a poor reputation.
These aspects are somewhat combined when the product design is made in part to be easily manufacturable (aka producible), testable, maintainable, and supportable, in addition to achieving the requirements of the anticipated end user/customer.
@Brian E:Let’s leave the trade deficit aside because it’s a distraction, other than highlighting we have a problem with our export/import relationship.
I don’t agree, because you can’t explain the thing I challenged you to explain:
Since you can’t even show it’s a problem, I don’t see any reason to think you have a valid solution.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check. You are saying that when you buy a house or a car you are now poorer because you can’t spend a house or a car….
the country we’re trading with are using protectionist tariffs as a tool to protect their industries
larger picture is raising enough revenue for the government and providing a expanding job base of good paying (based on the local economy) jobs
Hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions, check. None of these things addressed what I said. You can’t show that a trade deficit actually makes a country poorer, all you can do is confuse “wealth” with “money” and fog the issue with words. But the mistake you are making is really obvious: you are saying that whoever buys something is poorer and whoever sells something is richer. You are equating the net flow of currency with the total change in value. Currency is only part of what changes hands in a value-creating transaction.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context. – Me
Confusing/conflating currency with wealth, check. You are saying that when you buy a house or a car you are now poorer because you can’t spend a house or a car…. – Niketas C
I need your definition of wealth, because what you wrote makes no sense. I thought we were taking about trading commodities. And as far as I know shoes are a depreciating asset, so I’m not sure how they’re supposed to make you richer.
I get you like to argue, but you’re not making sense. And no I wasn’t conflating currency with wealth.
But yes, I think I can make the case that over time trade deficits are harmful to a country.
A job the Biden administration wouldn’t do.
U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the orbital lab ISS for nine months. They were supposed to come back last July 4th but problems with the Boeing Starliner prevented that.
Kinda brings tears to my eyes. I’ve been low-key worrying about Butch and Suni for months now, imagining what it would be like to stuck in space with no way home unless someone on Earth gets it together to come for me.
So Elon and SpaceX to the rescue!
With a little astronaut humor too.
__________________________________
‘Alien’ encounter: ISS crew member plays joke as SpaceX team arrives
Even astronauts have a sense of humor, as shown during NASA’s Crew-10 docking on the International Space Station (ISS), when they were met by an “alien” early Sunday morning.
Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner wore an alien mask while welcoming four newcomers after their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the station at 12:04 a.m., about 29 hours after launching at 7:03 p.m. on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
While ISS crew members were preparing the capsule for deboarding, Vagner could be seen floating around while wearing a mask, a hoodie, pants and socks during the “lighthearted moment,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/alien-encounter-nasa-astronaut-plays-joke-spacex-team-arrives
__________________________________
Musk and Trump say that the Biden administration prevented a SpaceX rescue because it would have boosted Trump’s election chances.
I don’t know, though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
Great set of comments about trade and money. Brings out different ways of looking at the “same” thing.
Niketas Choniates on March 17, 2025 at 2:10 pm said:
“Unless “wealth” and “currency” are being confused (or deliberately conflated), it doesn’t seem that a “trade deficit” can be bad. It’s a term created to SOUND bad.
[…] In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value.”
Yes, exactly! And trade (foreign or domestic) often has a very subjective (to minor subjective) aspect to it. Your example of shoes is good in that we value well fitting shoes over poor fitting ones, even when they cost the same and are equivalent in any other ways that matter to us (and also as you suggest even with the addition of $5 to the transaction). Such subjectivity is also pretty abstract and very hard to capture in a meaningful “value accounting”, except perhaps at some macro economic level where the subjectivity gets sort of homogenized. [See below about Brian E at 8:40.] Hayek basically claimed that the pricing signal was the best info we had available about that assessment of relative value.
However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on, in whatever legal transaction he chooses.
I might misunderstand him, but perhaps Brian E at 2:50 pm has a similar idea with “Yes that may not show up as reduced wealth, but it certainly reduces our net worth.” Net worth could be money value or reputational value, which is of course the trust that makes a given money work.
Brian E on March 17, 2025 at 8:02 pm: somewhere I read that the vast bulk of money in circulation comes from commercial or private sector banking making loans as money “out of thin air”, several fold greater than the amount of money the Fed also “creates”. The part of this process I am not yet clear on is the real role that reserve requirements play in this, if any? Are the banks truly constrained by legal reserve requirements or by the anticipated creditworthiness of their borrowers?
Brian E on March 17, 2025 at 8:40 pm:
“Everything else being equal, the net worth of the one who gave a pair of shoes and $5 for a pair of shoes has gone down.
They both may be satisfied with the transaction, and in a sense feel richer, but you can’t spend richer, in that context.”
It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth. I am seeing some elements of the Marxist labor theory of value here, which was deeply flawed for ignoring other elements of value being added during industrialization, often by the “capitalists”. If both parties are satisfied with the net value of the transaction [an abstract feeling on their part] it does not matter what form of money or goods they (legally or morally) exchanged to achieve it.
But your comment at 10:04pm [is it really midnight already!!??] is setting aside why we are having this discussion. Ideally we have no tariff trade barriers, full and proper specialization and trade, and no mercantilist nonsense by the CCP with IP theft, currency manipulations, trying to monopolize elements of selected supply chains, etc. But if Trump’s assertions about the relative barriers implemented by our allies is true, and I have not seen anyone dispute his numbers (although he could well be wrong or “mistaken” for effect), then the argument you make to enhance our domestic industry and national security is a valid goal. It is probably going to be much more complicated to achieve than he or we can envision.
Somewhere else I read that the dollar as the global reserve currency also plays into some of this, and Vance et al. now want to devalue the dollar to adjust the import/export cost numbers to our favor, but in doing so they have to balance that against reducing global incentives to use $’s as the reserve currency.
Coming late to the party, I hope I have not been too muddled in my comments. I now see I almost missed the last two comments by Niketas and Brian.
But Brian at 11:03: “I can make the case that over time trade deficits are harmful to a country.”
I believe that that case can be made, but I concur with Niketas that I don’t yet see where you have done that.
Peace.
Oh, I almost forgot. This may be mildly or indirectly relevant to the above discussion.
Yesterday I came across a short essay/ book review on EconLib by Arnold Kling, addressing an author’s attempt to examine the merits and limits of the gold standard, fiat money, and Bitcoin: https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klingstablemoney.html
The end result did not fully satisfy Kling, but he thought it a useful examination of some of the issues. Perhaps some of you here will also find the book review and/or the actual book useful or interesting.
@Banned Lizard
It sounds like a plan all right, but frankly a wrongheaded and ineffectual plan.
There are a few problems with this logic.
Firstly: I can think of only one post-Soviet conflict involving Putin where the killing actually stopped. That’s in Transnistria, and it was by far the shortest and least bloody of the conflicts involved, with the active shooting being over and done in 1991 with the result of a Russian Army basically squatting on the relevant territory with the help of a separatist Neo-Soviet dictatorship, with an embattled Moldova forced to admit it had no resources to evict them or even defend their own people from things like the threatened bombardment of their capitol city. Resulting in multiple years of Lucy Kicks the Football offers of negotiations and so forth that have not gotten many people killed yet.
Everywhere else the result is worse.
Including Ukraine.
Speaking of which, people ignore that the Ukrainians and the various Western Allies (including those oh so butch and bullish EU members) did about the closest thing to acknowledging Crimea as Russian territory by excluding it from most of the limitations on Russian and Separatist forces in the Minsk Agreements and Zelenskyy’s declaration he would seek to only obtain the return of Crimea diplomatically in 2020, along with a host of other things like a referendum to divide the Donbas.
That didn’t work. The killing continued. Which is one reason why by mid 2021 Zelenskyy had to publicly walk that back.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-does-not-exclude-holding-referendum-crimea-donbass-2021-12-10/
We’ve been playing this particularly lethal ring around the rosie for a long time.
Unrelated, but Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone. And I admit Padraig is a truly fascinating figure that I wish I knew more about. I tend to focus my research on more recent times (from the 1500s onwards, and especially from the Victorian era to now), but he and the sort of post-Roman early Medieval era has really fascinated me. Fun fact: he was involved in his own financial scandal where he and his mission were accused of embezzlement, and he had to write a testimony trying to explain himself. It’s one of the documents we have from his own hand.
https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/confessio_english#
The other being a letter to the soldiers of “Coroticus” the King of the Romano-British Kingdom of Alt Clut, in which he condemned them for enslaving Christians in their raids.
https://www.confessio.ie/etexts/epistola_english#
Fascinating stuff to look over.
That said, the idea that there is “dispute” about whether he was the “first significant” Christian missionary in Ireland is probably not true, we have very solid evidence that Christianity had a presence in Ireland decades before Padraig’s birth (let alone his kidnapping and enslavement and then escape to Britain before returning). Nothing like a majority presence mind, but enough we can be pretty sure the Pope appointed a Bishop and Missionary (Palladius) and Ireland had even begun to have some native-born saints like St. Columba.
Padraig would have been fairly early to the story (overlapping with the sort of first or second generation of monastery builders) but would have been viewed as something of a Johnny-come-Lately by the established clerical authorities.
I’ve considered trying to write a sort of Hagiographic/Apologetic biographical historical fiction historical fantasy about Padraig, and I have a few ideas about it. But I confess that the politics and history of this era are daunting even for me, and the myths even more so. I’d definitely need to do more research in order to have anything like confidence I’d be able to do justice to it. That said, I DO think I have a pretty good idea on how to explain/justify the Snakes thing (in spite of it being allegorical in general, probably not dating back to Padraig’s own time, and not being strictly true in either of the usual sense – there being no native snakes the animals for Padraig to drive off, and Irish Paganism not being ended for generations after his death).
Namely in the form of a particularly brutal, tyrannical Pagan warlord (probably based somewhere in the Southeast) who while having made his start by piracy and maritime trading (indeed his goons might even be the ones to have captured Padraig in this case) has ambitions to bring the rest of the island and possibly more under his power as a new, stronger kind of High King. And who is not at all above trying to use hook and crook to do so, especially as he claims to be favored by the divine (tentatively, likely claims to be a favorite of Cernunos, God of the Hunt), which he can supposedly show by way of “godly emissaries” that grant him favor and his enemies death in strange and terrifying fashion when he does not simply have his Fianna (roving warrior nobles) or other troops kill them.
After all, it is true that there have been no snakes on Ireland for thousands of years, but they ARE very much present on the continent… and you can kind of guess how this might go…
Still very early in concept.
“The worst imaginable “trade deficit” would be another country bringing goods to this one, and never taking any goods in return. In that case, our country would obviously be wealthier; we’d be getting something for nothing. Since the worst possible trade deficit makes us richer, it’s hard to see how a lesser trade deficit makes us poorer, and I’ve never seen anyone make the mathematical proof that there’s a less bad trade deficit that reverses the sign of the change in wealth from trade, I’ve just seen hand-waving and arguing about auxiliary assumptions; favorite ones being that manufacturing and agriculture are somehow more healthy or virtuous, or that fiat currency is the problem, or that we’re being “financialized”.” – Niketas C.
Apparently, you’re living in another world, an illusionary world where stock prices are the economy. President Trump is working in the real world, where people work for a living.
“In reality what is being exchanged in trade is value.” – Niketas C.
No what’s being exchanged is two pairs of shoes.
“However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on.” – R2L
I would say we haven’t done a particularly good job at that. While this is important, not just globally but domestically as well. But I’m not sure how value enters into trade relationships. Value is something that’s added at point of purchase. If you’re saying that the trade imbalance between Europe and the US is reflected in the underlying value of the goods being exchanged, that’s a concept I’ve never heard before.
What I see as the problem with that imbalance is our manufacturing/distribution is being underutilized in contrast to the trading partner.
“It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth.” – R2L
Net Worth=Assets-Liabilities.
“Somewhere else I read that the dollar as the global reserve currency also plays into some of this, and Vance et al. now want to devalue the dollar to adjust the import/export cost numbers to our favor, but in doing so they have to balance that against reducing global incentives to use $’s as the reserve currency.” – R2L
I find that hard to believe that Vance would consider that as a solution, given his background. That isn’t a solution. I would be interested in the source for that.
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I’ve tried to parse out the left’s solution to our deficit problem. The left wants lots of unskilled/low cost labor for a couple of reasons. Lowers the cost of goods as it suppresses labor costs. But the left isn’t focused on exports as a strategy, but relies on imports to keep cost of living affordable– with government payments to make up the difference between low wages and affordability.
Which leads to large deficits. As I said the left isn’t concerned with exports- so high corporate taxes and high taxes on the upper class also isn’t a concern.
The difference can be made up with tapping the last untaxed pool of money– unrealized capital gains. Since the majority of Americans don’t have a large portion of their assets in equities, they will likely view this as the golden egg. Tapping into that would seem to given an nearly unlimited supply of taxes to fund all sorts of equitable solutions.
So the tradeoff is a hollowing out of exports and a compliant Fed that makes decisions to enhance share price over it’s stated purpose of employment/inflation. We’re already partially on our way to this goal, with subsidized food, housing and healthcare. They were working on free secondary education and reparations to add some additional spending money to the mix.
The fact this isn’t sustainable will be dealt with in the future– sort of how our government debt is being dealt with– we’ll fix it in the future.
The alternative to this scenario is President Trump’s attempt to increase the size of the economy through his deregulation/energy/trade policies.
I am not an economist, nor do I play one on television, but one aspect of the shoe trade is that when the exchange includes $5 to sweeten the deal the receiver of the cash is better off in some way because money is fungible, but shoes aren’t.
@ Turtler in re Patrick and the Snakes: one explanation I’ve seen is symbolical, in that snakes represent Lucifer and his minions, which would be pagans at the time, and Patrick helped drive them out of the country (IOW convert them).
Our local Welsh society, among others, capitalizes on his origin in Britain, some say in the area now denoted Wales, and walk in St Paddy’s Day parades with banners proclaiming “St Patrick was a Welshman.”
I send cards on The Day because my heritage includes Welsh and Irish: a two-fer!
@BrianE:Apparently, you’re living in another world, an illusionary world where stock prices are the economy.
Making up opinions from imaginary people, not present here, and attributing them to me, does not cover for your inability to show that a “trade deficit” somehow makes a country poorer.
@AesopFan:I am not an economist, nor do I play one on television, but one aspect of the shoe trade is that when the exchange includes $5 to sweeten the deal the receiver of the cash is better off in some way because money is fungible, but shoes aren’t.
There is no question that someone who got the shoes he wanted and $5 has got more than that SAME person would if he only got the shoes he wanted. But you have no way to know if both participants in the trade got the same increase in value. It depends on how much each side valued that $5 and the shoes. It is not true that everyone values money and goods to the same extent in every transaction.
As a side note, money is only fungible when we agree it is. There’s nothing inherently fungible about it. If you disagree, try paying for your groceries with a combination of euros, yuan, and dollars; or paying with cash when a shop only takes cards.
But think of a situation where you buy from someone who also buys from you. Suppose you sell shoes and I sell printer ink. Once day I happen to buy shoes from you for $100 and you buy printer ink from me for $90 dollars.
The net flow of currency is $10 to you; this would be the “trade deficit”. But the change in value to both of us is not that I am $10 poorer and you are $10 richer.
I got shoes, which I wanted more than I wanted my $100, and you got rid of shoes which you wanted less than you wanted my $100. We both got richer. Then you bought printer ink which you wanted more than your $90 and which I wanted less than your $90. We both got richer again.
My lowest value outcome was to be stuck with my printer ink, my $100, and no shoes. Your lowest value outcome was to be stuck with your shoes and your $90 and no printer ink. We both got outcomes we valued higher, and so both got richer. (Potentially there could have been different outcomes we liked even better, if the dollar amounts were different.) The two positive changes we each got do not magically add up to a negative change for one of us.
But the Brian E logic (ok not to blame him, it’s not uncommon) is that I was better off with my lowest-value outcome because the net flow of money was $10 from me. That’s because his fallacy is to identify the net flow of currency with the net change in value for each participant–he’s leaving out a big chunk of the accounting. To use his “net worth” terminology, he is not counting change in assets, only the cash flow…
If his logic were correct, then trade is always somebody getting exploited and nothing is valuable but money.
Brian E, it is amazing how fast time flies. I struggled to recall when I saw that article, which I then found I had copied to MS Word on 3/4/25, along with rereading an older article I found last August. Two weeks gone “just like that”. Money may be valuable to us, but many pundits and philosophers suggest that time is even more so, given we only have so much of it.
I have not reread these to confirm they fill the bill on a discussion of reserve currency in detail, but here are the two items that I believe I was considering:
1) https://www.city-journal.org/article/dollar-devaluation-is-a-dangerous-gambit?utm_source=virtuous&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cjdaily
A Dangerous Gambit
Devaluing the dollar won’t pay off.
Patrick Horan Aug 20 2024 [copied to Word 8/21/24; reread 3/4/25]
2) https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-tariffs-us-debt-dollar-economy
Making Sense of the Trump Tariffs
They will bring other countries to the negotiating table.
Joshua Hendrickson 3/3/2025 [copied to Word 3/4/25; actually very short at 2+ pages]
And to prime the intellectual pump, here is an extract that summarizes his message, maybe:
“The Trump administration has three objectives related to America’s position in the international monetary system. [I converted prose to bullet listing for improved clarity]
[1] First, it wants to maintain but reduce the financial burdens associated with the U.S.’s leading role.
[2] Second, it wants to get our national debt on a more sustainable path.
[3] Third, it wants to restore America’s industrial capacity.
These objectives are coherent only if one understands the global financial system. The U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and the U.S. Treasury security is the global reserve asset. This means, respectively, that the dollar is the primary currency used in international trade, and that foreign central banks and other institutions store wealth in terms of dollars with Treasury securities.
America’s central role in the world economy benefits us in several ways. It relaxes constraints on the federal government’s ability to borrow, for example, and allows Washington to use financial sanctions against foreign enemies rather than military force.
But these benefits come with costs. One such cost is that the dollar, because of its reserve status, tends to be overvalued. This makes foreign goods cheaper for U.S. consumers, but it also makes foreign labor and production cheaper for reasons unrelated to comparative advantage—a dynamic that has hollowed out America’s industrial base.
Another consequence of America’s role in the system is that it encourages us to accumulate debt. As foreign countries’ economies grow, so does their demand for reserves. If the U.S. doesn’t supply enough debt to meet that growing demand, our borrowing costs decline, which motivates politicians to run larger deficits.”
Right now I figure I have maybe a 70% understanding of these things, so welcome any clarifying discussion.
Having said what a “trade deficit” doesn’t mean, which is to say making a country poorer, I should probably say what it DOES mean. It means somebody somewhere is trading currencies.
If I’m importing something from the UK I might pay in dollars, but more likely they want pounds. I have to trade my dollars to someone who has pounds. That entity is always being offered currency exchanges, and when dollars are in high demand you can get a lot of pounds for them and when dollars are in low demand you don’t get as many. The relative price between currencies can affect the volume of foreign trade. Some kind of equilibrium is struck between the effect of the volume of foreign trade and the effect of the currency exchanges.
When I buy something from a seller in the UK, my trade deficit is still measured in dollars, but that I doesn’t mean I actually send dollars out of the country. In many cases it does, but the overall trade deficit implies that if dollars ever leave, the dollars eventually come back somehow; through investment, lending, purchasing American products, or simply by being exchanged for other currencies. Alternatively, importers and exporters in other countries may use the dollars to settle their own transactions with each other and in fact this also happens. In addition, people in other countries may simply be stockpiling the dollars to spend later and of course this also happens, but in the end that’s a time-delayed version of one of the other alternatives.
Brian’s response to my comment:
“It strikes me, Brian, that perhaps we also need to see your definition of net worth.” – R2L
“Net Worth=Assets-Liabilities.
But I am adding or exploring “value” beyond pure $ pricing, and assets and liabilities are designated in $’s. This is of course abstract and subjective. For NC’s fictional trader, if he really wanted black shoes badly enough, he would have potentially had to offer even more than $5. Following Trump’s negotiating strategy, the initial “demand” should have been for the shoes + $1000. That bid would be rejected and eventually they get down to shoes + (say) $10 and an “equitable” trade that both parties can live with. At a $5 premium, someone left money on the table vs. what the traders valued in reality.
I have to admit that I struggle to understand double entry bookkeeping. I have never had a course in that and trying to pick it up on my own, I am probably failing to truly understand and adopt a neutral approach for an entry being “two sides of the same coin”. I still want to see assets as positive and liabilities as negative. Sigh.
In rereading Brian E on March 18, 2025 at 2:09 pm:
“However, part of the value element is also the value of our reputation for honoring the expectations that our money will retain its initial value for the importer to use later on.” – R2L
“I would say we haven’t done a particularly good job at that. While this is important, not just globally but domestically as well. But I’m not sure how value enters into trade relationships. Value is something that’s added at point of purchase.”
But since the $ is still the global reserve currency [under attack but still dominant], we have done a rather better than expected job at finessing our reputation via our liberty and prosperity as the “final” resting place where people put their money version of their wealth. Clearly that could change, and I am not sure if we would end up being better or worse off as a result. Presumably pros and cons either way.
My perception is that for a given exchange, value is discovered or determined or made public at the point of completing the transaction, but the value resides in each trader’s personal (and often subjective) preferences until the equilibrium balancing price is agreed to. And if the negotiation was done poorly, someone may have obtained or retained even greater personal value than the price value. [Or is this a conversation about language nit picking?]
Peace.
@AesopFan
Oh yeah, that was definitely the original intent behind it. Which I tried to allude to with the fictional villain’s leanings (pagan and evil even by the standards of the time) and how he is importing/smuggling the snakes in by his boats. But the symbolic connection between Lucifer and Serpents is old and goes all the way back to the Bible.
Indeed, and I would love to see it at some point. Brythonic-Welsh history and culture fascinates me.