PS: Good afternoon, everyone!

The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes:
https://files.catbox.moe/y1jbpt.pdf
https://tinyurl.com/2mdrp49v

Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow:
https://tinyurl.com/yjp5hz7k

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:
https://files.catbox.moe/56vr5r.pdf
https://tinyurl.com/3x6vnu3u

On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation:
https://tinyurl.com/3hvj5zpy

Cheers! ☮️

PS: I know California, SafeNow, but only from 3 decades back. I can't really imagine what things are like. Maybe the closest i get is reading - when I used to - the writings of Victor Davis Hanson about his area in the San Joaquin Valley.

As for Steven Miller, well, he was tired of kids speaking Spanish in his High School in California and made a thing of it. I don't know how long it's been since he's lived there though.

PS
“…but I don't think Mr. Paul then or even now realized(es) how mostly important this problem is.” - Mr. Moderator

I agree. And I will go further. I don’t think very many non-California residents realize the breadth and depth and nuances of the consequences. To fully grasp it, one must be an observant, long-term, California resident. We here in California are now into the second and third generation; that is, the children and grandchildren. We are a glimpse into what the future looks like for the rest of the country. Very possibly, not even Stephen Miller realizes the nuances of daily life that have unraveled. The onslaught is a “crisis,” yes. But it is also a matter of what the future looks like.

PS: "Then, in June 2015, as we all know, the Big Orange Menace blundered onto the scene, at first with incoherent remarks about the harms of Third World immigration, and other remarks that soon caught on." Yep, it's been almost 10 years, Mr. Hail. I agree completely that Trump would have gone NOWHERE with his run for President had he not brought up this issue that had been ignored, more likely suppressed, for years and years.

"The outlines of how it all went, though, were predicted by Buchanan and others back to the 1990s, the only lament they will have had being: If only it had been a more morally-serious, disciplined person to lead the political insurgency.)"

Yep. I've said this multiple times already, but I wish Ron Paul had heeded my advice in late Winter of '12 when I told him in person "If you want to win [REDACTED], you've got to talk about illegal immigration."

See Ron Paul's a real man of principle, so he wouldn't have brought up that issue just to win, even knowing it would help so much. He replied to me (and the people listening) that "Yeah, I'm all in favor of enforcing the law.) That was no lie, but I don't think Mr. Paul then or even now realized(es) how mostly important this problem is.

He could have been a 4-years earlier anti-immigration enforcer, again with, this time, maybe 30 more IQ points (he was also more serious and disciplined than the Orange Man) and a real plan to save the nation's finances. I think it could have been done a dozen years ago, not without financial pain, but not the level we've got coming.

That's too bad

PS: Mr. Hail, your time line on the NAFTA political battles comports with my memory too. That was a big issue for both Ross Perot and Paul Tsongas (yes, a Democrat) in 1992. The former was in some ways a proto-Trump, but with 20 more IQ points. Yes, I read (had to be magazines and newspaper editorials, NOT the internet!) back during '93 the surprise of people that NAFTA and free trade policy in general were supported by big pols of both squads.

I will admit that though I already didn't like NAFTA, I'd been sucked in by the free trade mantra long enough to not thing so much bad about it. In the mid-'90s, as my friend Frank and I discussed this whole thing more with respect to China, I remember being on China's side. He'd said "It's gonna end up us working for the same wages as the Chinese." "Well, what's wrong with that?" I said. I haven't always been right. ;-}

Even with it being 6 years since the Reagan-signed amnesty, and with people even somewhat aware knowing that illegals Mexicans (mostly just them at that point) were still pouring in, the immigration question was not very big in '92. Was it even discussed at all in debates? (I will have to try to find info on that - memory won't cut it.) This was just before Peter Brimelow wrote his book "Alien Nation" on the immigration invasion. Too bad he wasn't running for office! (He was still a financial analyst type then, on TV and all, though I don't remember having ever seen him on TV myself.)

PS: Mr. Hail, there's a link in my previous post that goes to a post of mine from last summer about Bai Dien's tariffs. This was in disagreement with Ron Paul on this same thing and agreement with the former President's tariffs, amazingly, as it's normally quite the opposite. Thanks for providing a few numbers here.

I also appreciate the reminder about Pat Buchanan's columns - I write "reminder", as I used to read him fairly regularly. I may have read those. I'm glad you pasted in that complete one. Although not as Libertarian as Ron Paul, Mr. Buchanan has understood what's going on for as long as Ron Paul. Ron Paul still does not have a real understanding of the ruination via the immigration invasion, IMO. (Then, too, as much as he's supposedly doing, perhaps neither does Trump, based on some of his remarks. He's even got his underlings - I think Homan, saying "so if they leave, then they can come back legally." WTF?

Speaking of both these guys, Ron Paul saw the housing bubble crash coming a year or more away too. There's a good video or two out there. People are AMAZED at his prescience. Well, I mean it's simple economics. I will say that I saw this coming too, not particularly all that was going on in the economy 20 years back but at least the craziness with housing. "Housing always goes up!" so "You can't lose by loaning anyone money to buy a house, and I mean ANYONE."

PS: Although I always appreciate the easy access provided to the books that are discussed here, thanks to Adam Smith, I don't have time to read them all. Thanks, Mr. Hail for noting the chapter in Mr. Eckes book that discusses the. Smoot-Hawley tariffs. I need to read that part.

Yes, the discussion under Ron Paul's most recent column got heated, as when I get this annoyed by a rude guy like that, I end up giving back the same. However, I just read over my first 3 comments there. They were in nice polite disagreement with Ron Paul, but nothing to tee someone off like that. I'm afraid I'm dead set for getting back on there with about 3 or 4 more points.

The thing is, I don't really have much to disagree with the guy on. Some of it rolled over from another thread (under the previous Ron Paul column) , again, which started with some polite remarks by me about Steve Sailer, as this guy trashed him.

Anyway, I'll get back to that over there, not here.

PS

To respond to the point about Ron Paul's latest column against tariffs: No one should be surprised by that.

I don't think the comment-war with that one rude Australian achieved much productive for anyone. Commenters like that are generally time-wasters.

The economist John Cochrane, of the Hoover Institution, has softened his views on tariffs somewhat. He says that while "they will take my economists' union card" if he endorses tariffs outright for any reason, he says there may be space for them for "national security reasons."

What's funny is that has been one of the main-line justifications argued for tariffs for decades, not some one-neat-trick innovation of the past year or few years.

https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/economic-statecraft-and-trade

John Cochrane, economist, adds this idea: If any new protectionism be introduced, a team of economic experts should be commissioned to calculate costs of those measures. The calculated costs should be deducted from the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon chieftains can have a voice in whether to veto those deductions, or keep them, if the justification is national security.

PS

See also these syndicated columns by Pat Buchanan (hosted at his website) separated by a quarter century:

"The Isolationist Myth," Dec. 3, 1994

....and....

"Tariffs: The Taxes That Made America Great," May 13, 2019.

.

PB says:

"That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s is a New Deal myth in which America’s schoolchildren have been indoctrinated for decades. The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: The Federal Reserve..."

PS

Of interest in this discussion: Pat Buchanan predicted the recession of 2008-09. Most people only came to realize a recession was imminent in September 2008, I think, when some theatrics happened, conveniently timed to elect an unknown figure with a Kenyan father. There was other strange signals going on, earlier in 2008, and here noticed in late 2007 already by Buchanan, but it wasn't until September 2008 and the following months that it really hit home.

(Buchanan, writing in November 2007, couldn't have predicted that Great Stagnation that followed the 2008-09 recession, which in some ways was still being felt even as late as 2015, a grand re-arrangement of things by which the White Middle was now being overtly squeezed in a way aligned to longer-term policies. Then, in June 2015, as we all know, the Big Orange Menace blundered onto the scene, at first with incoherent remarks about the harms of Third World immigration, and other remarks that soon caught on. The outlines of how it all went, though, were predicted by Buchanan and others back to the 1990s, the only lament they will have had being: If only it had been a more morally-serious, disciplined person to lead the political insurgency.)

Here is the syndicated column as it appears at the Buchanan website:

__________________________

THE CRASH OF 2008?

November 15, 2007
by Patrick J. Buchanan

In March 1929, the Harding-Coolidge era came to an end. The eight years had witnessed the greatest peacetime prosperity of any nation in history: America in the Roaring 20s. Early that March, Calvin Coolidge handed the presidency over to Herbert Hoover, who had just pulled off a third straight Republican landslide.

“I do not choose to run,” said Coolidge, who could easily have won a second full term. Silent Cal went home. Hoover, whom he privately derided as “Wonder Boy,” presided over the Crash of ’29 and the first three years of the Great Depression.

History holds Harding, Coolidge and Hoover responsible for the Depression, with Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley of Smoot-Hawley fame, as accessories. As Voltaire observed, history is a pack of lies agreed upon.

Two men debunked the myth that the low-tax, high-tariff policy of the 1920s brought on the Depression. The more famous is Milton Friedman, who proved to the satisfaction of a Nobel Prize committee that the Depression was a monetary phenomenon. The Fed had opened the sluices, and the money had swamped the stock market.

When Wall Street crashed, there came a run on the banks by men who had bought on margin, a depositors’ stampede, a bank collapse, a wipeout of uninsured savings and the loss of a third of the money supply, lifeblood of the economy. The Fed never gave the nation the needed transfusions. Hoover and FDR misdiagnosing the crisis, raised taxes and wrote up new regulations, which was like putting a body cast on a patient in shock from the loss of a third of his blood.

The Smoot-Hawley myth, repeated by John McCain in the Detroit debate, was demolished by Alfred Eckes of Ohio University, Reagan’s man at the FTC and America’s foremost authority on the history of trade and tariffs, in his 1995 “Opening America’s Markets.”

The point of this brief history: The recent hand-off from Alan Greenspan, the maestro of the Global Economy, to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke may turn out to have been a lateral far behind the line of scrimmage, leaving Bernanke holding the bag for a recession for which he is no more responsible than was the hapless Hoover.

Last week, the stock market saw 4 percent of its value wiped out. Oil reached nearly $100 a barrel. The dollar fell to record lows against the Canadian dollar and the euro. The price of gold was $850 an ounce, signaling inflation and a worldwide lack of confidence in the Fed’s ability or determination to defend the world’s reserve currency.

The Chinese, with $1.4 trillion in reserves, perhaps 80 percent in dollar assets, indicated they may dump dollars and move into euros. Merrill-Lynch took an $8 billion hit. Citibank is signaling massive losses from its subprime mortgage debt. General Motors reported an operating loss of $1.6 billion for the quarter and a whopping $39 billion charge that is among the biggest profit hits ever reported.

Where does this leave Bernanke? On the horns of a dilemma.

Exposure of all that subprime debt going rotten on the books of our biggest banks, the staggering losses being reported, the inability of homeowners to refinance or borrow any further against their equity, the credit crunch – all argue for an easy money policy to get capital back into the economic bloodstream.

Thus the Fed has cut interest rates from 5.25 percent to 4.5 percent. Thus the howls for deeper cuts, thus the market anticipation of another cut, though the Fed has said no more.

But the Fed is responsible not only for the national economy. It is responsible for defending the dollar, which represents the real savings and wealth of the nation. And that dollar has lost more value in seven years than in any similar period in modern history. A euro, worth 83 cents the year Bush was elected, has risen in value to $1.47.

As the dollar sinks, exporters may cheer rising sales, but at home we will soon find that the prices of all those imported goods from Europe and Asia down at the mall are starting to rise. U.S. soldiers, diplomats, tourists and businessmen overseas are already feeling the pain of a falling dollar.

If a recession is generally a sign the Fed should loosen up, a run on the dollar is a sign the Fed should tighten by raising interest rates to make dollars and dollar-denominated assets more attractive.

But the Fed’s raising of interest rates would push up the rates on mortgages, credit cards and auto loans, and push millions of marginal folks into bankruptcy and the country into recession, a disaster for the Republicans.

But, given their free-trade fanaticism and free-spending ways, that fate would not be undeserved. Say a prayer for Ben Bernanke. He may have to eat the football that scrambling quarterback Greenspan tossed to him far behind the line of scrimmage.

(end of column, by Pat Buchanan, Nov 2007, "The Crash of 2008?")

______________________

PS

-- More on the Eckes free-trade vs protectionism book and controversy of the 1990s --

The Alfred Eckes book (see comments below), published around Fall 1995, opens with reference to the acrimonious fights over the proposed North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The NAFTA fights date to the period about 1990-1996. The NAFTA controversy bolstered the Ross Perot For President campaigns of 1992 and 1996 along the way, and clearly remained in the mind of Donald Trump, then in his later forties. The whole thing seems to have largely fading in the second Clinton term and NAFTA was seldom mentioned by the 2000s.

NAFTA passed the U.S. House and Senate Nov 17th-20th, 1993, and only passed narrowly (234-200 in the House). In the weeks and months preceding that week in November 1993, the wider debate peaked and it is the recollection of that surge of trade-policy debate in the public forum that Dr Eckes recalled when writing his book, perhaps about the same time or within a year at least.

The anti-NAFTA side, and to a great extent the "spin-off" Perot-'92 campaign, were among the final major "stand(s)" for trade-protectionism in U.S. political history.

The protectionist side was itself, seems like it was bound to lose, facing, as it did, a free-trade drumbeat from 1945 onward that had become a consensus of right-thinking people by the 1980s or 1990s, and trade-protectionism was practically relegated to old-holdovers like Pat Buchanan in the first quarter of the 21st century.

The decades of consensus explains this reaction to the (as so often, ham-fisted and bluster-full) moves towards tariffs by President Trump II. (Another of the problems is that tariff policy historically was a matter for Congress, not for fiat directive from a president. Hence many of the great figures associated with tariffs pro or con are Congressional leaders, including Smooth and Hawley).

___________

Here is a 2500-word review of the Eckes book from 1995:

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/the-sword-in-the-stone-2/

.

Here are a few articles by Eckes himself from about the same time:

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/cobdens-pyrrhic-victory/

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/selling-out-past-and-present/

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/cultural-revolutions/the-notorious-star-chamber/

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/the-grass-in-american-streets/

(I send these without reading them but will later)

PS

It's funny to recall, now, that Joe Biden himself in 2024, after consultation with his experts, imposed heavy tariffs on China. His top adviser at the time (May 2024) said:

“China is using the same 'playbook' it has before to power its own growth at the expense of others,” said Lael Brainard, director of the White House National Economic Council. “China’s simply too big to play by its own rules.”

100% tariffs on cars, 50% tariffs on all products related to solar panels, and 25% for many other sectors.

What's funny about this is, it's the same reasoning that the pro-tariff side has often argued for; and which they are now so angry about, not necessarily for the specifics (antagonizing allies, I agree is a bad idea); but often more out of pure principle.

The pro-protectionism voices in recent decades have always pointed to PRC-China. China has copied the same types of strategies used by many U.S. allies in the decades after 1945. The U.S. free-trade policies, including wide toleration of many forms of non-playing-field cheating by allies, majorly propped up (artificially inflated?) the economies of places like Japan and South Korea and others. When an enemy and majorly problematic state like China began copying the same strategies by the 1990s, free-trade by then as an ideology was dug in deep and was impossible to fully dislodge.

PS

Thanks, Mr Smith, for the copy of the Alfred Eckes book.

He has a full chapter on the Smoot-Hawley controversy. When and why that idea became so fixed in the mid-brow and high-brow popular mind I'd like to know.

PS: Sorry for the long delay in replying, M. Yes, that's the way I see it - the FED supposedly an independent bank but as urged by the government, causes a bubble (whether purposely or not) and then decides to implement a "solution" to solve said problem and causes a lot of grief. Governments seem to work this way a lot.

"Not sure how much tariffs are going to re-onshore manufacturing. How does a 25% tariff on steel do against a 300% cost difference to build a ship due to the US still using shipbuilding techniques not used by the rest of the world since before WW2? That's like asking everyone to go back to using stevedores to load a ship."

Well, it didn't take that much of a difference in cost to drive 3 US aluminum companies out of business, as I read in a ZeroHedge article. As for the lack of ability on the part of Americans, it would indeed take a while to get it back. It's not easy to reverse the process started 30-40 years ago. There's going to be financial pain. However, you have to get started.

BTW, I never knew what stevedores were till now. I can remember old movies in which many thousand of guys worked blocks/tackle to unload cargo in big nets or whatever. The roro (Roll-on, roll-off) container ships were made big by SeaLand, in America. I used to see that company's containers around more 20 years ago and back. Their first container ship did a US - Japan route back in 1968.

PS
"The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during the late 1920s, piling up in the stock market as a bubble. The Fed then panicked, miscalculated, and let the money supply collapse by a third by 1933, depriving the economy of the liquidity it needed to breathe. Trade had nothing to do with it."

And there's the reason for the panicked reaction to tariffs right there. The money supply has ballooned due to...the government's reaction to certain problems. So that's phase 1. If we replicated the conditions, phase 2 would be a (re-)tightening of the money supply, and phase 3 would be tariffs.
Certainly the money supply needs tightening.

Not sure how much tariffs are going to re-onshore manufacturing. How does a 25% tariff on steel do against a 300% cost difference to build a ship due to the US still using shipbuilding techniques not used by the rest of the world since before WW2? That's like asking everyone to go back to using stevedores to load a ship.

PS: I don't know if you read that latest Ron Paul post, Mr. Hail. There were some arguments, partly because the one guy is just a rude MF, and I give back what I get.

Anyway, I mentioned some of this. I read a book called "The Forgotten Man" by Amity Schlaes (sp?) about the Great Depression. She did not agree with the Smoot-Hawley tariff cause for the GD either. It's one thing to be against these tariffs on economic principles, but then what about my (1) and (2) in my previous post. How can one be against that, unless it's purely due to being against anything Trump does?

The free trade mantra has been pushed by the WSJ types for a long time. I guess it's gotten into the psyche of a lot of people. The WSJ Big-Biz types don't really care WHO makes out best as far as the regular people, as long as GDP is good, as, well, per the cartoon here.

Adam, as usual, thank you so much for getting us online copies for people who are interested. Did you read Ron Paul's column? What do you think about the tariffs?

PS: Good afternoon, Messrs. Hail and Moderator!

Protectionism Didn't Cause the Great Depression by Ian Fletcher...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/protectionism-didnt-cause_b_527274

Opening America's Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776...
https://tinyurl.com/ycxse5pe (30.3mb .pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/yn8djr2p (1.5mb .epub)
https://files.catbox.moe/aap6vt.epub (1.5mb .epub)(same as above)

Happy Thursday! ☮️

PS

-- Economist orthodoxy on tariffs --

The strong reactions against protective tariffs have surprised me. No consideration is being given, by those condemning the tariffs, to the other side of the argument.

Granted that the show is being managed by the Orange-man in his usual cavalier and showbiz-kind-of-way. The whole matter of trade-protectionism, however, being treated like a crazy person doing wide-ranging damage for no reason, as if in a fit of mental instability, is not really old-tyme Trump Derangement Syndrome but more of free-trade ideology that has dug in deep. Many are going along with the idea that protectionism if practiced by the USA is a horrific blasphemy.

Maybe the anti-protectionist side is right, or at least more right on net (even if not for all people always; nor for all ends and purposes). But they are a little too confident that the protectionist side has zero rationale behind it.

It's been taken on faith, for some time, that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 "exacerbated, "deepened," or even "caused" the Great Depression. The political talk-show host Lawrence O'Donnell has been getting lots of attention lately, slamming Trump for the tariffs. He confidently asserts that every idiot knows that trade-protectionism caused the Great Depression, and Trump is sooo, sooooo stupid that he doesn't realzie he is blundering to another Great Depression through any use of tariffs. All educated people, O'Donnell has been saying nightly for some time, know that Smoot-Hawley was "the proximate cause of the Great Depression."

Among the scholars who dispute this received quasi-wisdom that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff "caused" the Great Depression is: Dr Alfred Eckes who, in the late 1990s, published a very interesting book titled:

"Opening America's Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776."

"Eckes challenges criticisms of the 'infamous' protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which allegedly worsened the Great Depression and provoked foreign retaliation. In trade history, he says, this episode was merely a mole hill, not a mountain."

_____

See also: "Protectionism Didn't Cause the Great Depression," Ian Fletcher, Huffington Post, June 6, 2010.

_____