The Tendency toward Self-Destructive False Equivalence

During the past year, I have heard many advocates of protectionism claim that without tariffs trade is not fair.  The Chinese have tariffs, so we need to have tariffs as well in order to make trade fair.  Trade must be equivalent. If they buy from us, we need to buy from them.

This reasoning makes as much sense as this:   Since I buy from Wal-Mart but Wal-Mart doesn't buy from me, I should stop buying from Wal-Mart.  It isn't fair that trade is one way.

That is mistaken, of course. If we buy from the Chinese, but they do not buy from us, the dollar will become weak, and the Chinese currency, the yuan renminbi, will become strong. The Chinese goods will become expensive, and Americans will stop buying them. That has not occurred because of the policies of China's communist dictators.

China's communist dictators believe that if they do not subsidize demand for their manufactured products, then their regime may collapse.  If rural inland farmers who have migrated to the cities find themselves unemployed, then they will riot.  As a result, the communists depress wages.  In accordance with the law of supply and demand, low wages stimulate employment.  The migrant farmers do not realize that their $8,000-a-year paycheck is small.  They do not know that Americans who are less productive than they are earn $40,000 a year.  

The Chinese use a few methods to keep wages low and to make their urban migrants suffer in exchange for social passivity.  These include printing ever-larger amounts of yuan; using much of the printed yuan for valueless real estate, ghost cities, and pet projects;  suppression of the yuan by directly purchasing US dollars; purchasing treasury bonds with purchased US dollars; and tariffs. 

These are self-impoverishment strategies: They make the average citizen poorer because they weaken the yuan.  At poorer wages, employment is stimulated, and citizens are too busy to riot, but most are poorer.

In exchange, Americans benefit from the option to purchase inexpensive merchandise that is cheaper than we could purchase without China's self-impoverishment strategies.  The cost of that is that some manufacturing plants close, but the benefit outweighs the cost.  If every American spends more on manufactured goods, the cost is enormous; if there is a 20% increase in manufacturing employment, the benefit is small. 

Americans follow similar but more moderate self-impoverishment strategies.  For instance, America's Federal Reserve Bank prints lots of paper money and hands it to unproductive Wall Street stock jobbers, investors who are so incompetent that they required a $29 trillion bailout ten years ago and continue to require ongoing monetary subsidization.  

The ongoing subsidization of Wall Street makes Americans poorer, of course, because someone has to pay.  At poorer wages, Americans enjoy full employment, but we don't go as far as the Chinese because our farms have been integrated into the modern economy.

Nevertheless, Wall Street benefits from other self-impoverishment policies. The subprime crisis and excessive investment in technology both have benefited investors at the expense of American workers. However, Wall Street does not benefit from tariffs and trade impediments, which are also a self-impoverishment strategy.

The decision to establish tariffs would ordinarily make Americans poorer; however, do not underestimate the stupidity of the Chinese.  They may decide to make their citizens poorer still by further purchasing additional dollars.  This may result in Americans' becoming richer as the dollar strengthens; however, there will be further disinvestment in domestically produced importable merchandise--the opposite result of what Trump's supporters want.

The tendency toward self-destructive false equivalence is seen on the left as well as among Trump's supporters. Many leftists make this argument: America is the only country to have a political commitment to freedom; isn't that a reason to end the political commitment to freedom?  Well, yes, the rest of the world has a history of gassing dissenters and Jews, and left-wing, social democratic regimes are in that long tradition.  The left has a long history of self-destructive, delusional false equivalence. It is sad that the majority of Trump's supporters have adopted it as well.

When Colleges Say "Inclusive," What They Really Mean Is "No Conservatives"

The New York Post quotes my liberal arts study in an editorial today.  The editorial notes that speakers invited to campuses like SUNY Albany are overwhelmingly left wing.  At Indiana the rato is 30:9; at GWU the ratio is 9:2; at Alabama the ratio is 9:2, and at Vermont it is 44:2.  

This kind of phenomenon is consistent with the claims of Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and a brilliant psychological ethicist.  I am reading through Haidt's book Righteous Mind now, and his point is that moral reasoning is chiefly used to justify emotional moral reactions.  

Moral reasoning is not the way that we come to our chief political conclusions.  Rather, we tend to reason in a way that justifies conclusions at which we have arrived. We arrive at the conclusions in the first place through emotion; we then seek to confirm the emotional reaction by exposing ourselves to people and to reasoning that agrees with our feelings.  

As a result, social science is by nature susceptible to ideological bias as social scientists skew their findings, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the direction that fits their preconceptions.  That occurs with respect to hiring as well as campus speaker invitations. 

Women's Studies: 50 Points If You Punch a Nazi, and You Define What "Nazi" Means

This is an eminently quotable satire of women's studies by a  California adjunct professor who calls herself "Embarrassing Mom" (h/t Glenda McGee). Women's studies is an increasingly influential component of history and social science.

How the Democratic Party Has Caused Upstate New Yorkers to Flee

Upstate New Yorkers flee in large numbers.  According  to Jeff Platsky of the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. (h/t Glenda McGee),  84 people leave Broome County each month, 39 leave Chemung County, and 29 leave Tioga County.   

Platsky observes that every single county along Route 17 from Orange County to Pennsylvania has declined in population over the past decade; moreover, in upstate New York overall, 42 of 50 counties lost population.  Route 17 runs along the state's southern rim, known as the Southern Tier, which borders Pennsylvania. 

The reason is simple: lack of jobs. Yet, the Democratic Party has prevented  fracking in the Marcellus basin, which would have created thousands of jobs.  Instead, the jobs went to Pennsylvania.  Meanwhile, New York has the worst income inequality in the country--and the highest electricity rates.

Much of the protest against fracking has been misguided. For instance, Youtube  carries several videos of people who are able to ignite their tap water. The video makers claim that the problem was caused by nearby fracking. 

I asked a colleague at Brooklyn College about the videos.  The colleague, Constantin Cranganu, is a geologist who has written books on fracking. He told me that the water was catching on fire before the fracking and that fracking cannot possibly cause this, in part because the fracking occurs at a depth of over a mile while the water well is 100 or 200 feet deep.  Thousands of tons of rock separate the well from the fracking drill. 

Yet, meshuggener Democrats show this video to each other and proclaim that they wear the mantle of the one settled science, courtesy of Youtube, Bill Maher, and Al Gore. 

Writing in Forbes in 2015, Jude Clemente notes that New York's natural gas consumption had risen by more than a third, to 60% of its entire energy generation, but the state cut its natural gas production in the interest of ideological purity. The anti-fracking proponents are rich Democrats who work in tax-subsidized businesses: academia, government, law, and health care.  They have no qualms about forcing blue collar laborers into permanent unemployment. 

The handful of upstate counties that have gained population in New York mostly have been the ones surrounding Albany, seat of New York's bloated state government, or college towns. 

Platsky notes that there have been plenty of bureaucratically inspired, state-subsidized development schemes, all of which have failed.  

The exit of manufacturers like IBM and GE in the 1980s has not been followed by the kind of innovation that occurs in a free market economy. New York's high tax rates and totalitarian regulatory regime have inhibited entrepreneurship.  Retirees have little incentive to stay because of the cold climate and high taxes.