Right here’s Gideon Rachman in the FT:
“Our strategy on tariffs will be to shoot first and ask questions later.” That was what one among Donald Trump’s key financial policymakers advised me late final yr.
That form of macho swagger is at present trendy in Washington.
Macho swagger? The place have we seen that earlier than?
Again in 2004, the Bush administration was very assured in its skill to form actuality:
In the summertime of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White Home didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a gathering with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White Home’s displeasure, after which he advised me one thing that on the time I didn’t absolutely comprehend — however which I now imagine will get to the very coronary heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide mentioned that guys like me had been “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he outlined as individuals who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured one thing about enlightenment ideas and empiricism. He lower me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Sadly, actuality usually has its personal agenda. And as we noticed in Iraq, it’s not at all times what one may want to happen.
I usually see pundits discussing the financial implications of tariffs. Anybody who’s taken EC101 already is aware of that tariffs scale back effectivity, and I’ve little so as to add on that query. As well as, it’s not at all times simple to know what kind of coverage is being proposed. Does the federal government intend to impose tariffs, or merely threaten tariffs so as to bully our allies into kowtowing to our authorities with symbolic gestures of subservience?
In my opinion, a very powerful query as we speak shouldn’t be the technical elements of financial coverage, it’s not the deadweight loss from tariffs, relatively it’s the world political local weather. What explains the latest surge in authoritarian nationalism? Economics is downstream of politics.
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