Nobody who supports either free markets or the non-initiation of force principles can now think that the Trump Administration is an acolyte of either principle, even in a somewhat flawed way (as all governments that may advance in that direction are). It's an incoherent mash of the feelings of two men who are more upset about their egos being offended, than either projecting an economic policy of demonstrable success or managing international relations based on strength against a weak (albeit dangerous) aggressor that embodies almost everything the United States has been against for decades.
The stupid trade war isn't about leverage to get other economies to open up, it is old fashioned autarky or even Kim Il Sung's fatuous "Juche Idea" (self reliance). It's the economics of hardened Marxists, and the economics of moronic economic nationalists like the bloviator Pat Buchanan. The tariffs wont replace income tax ( a line that some have trotted out) and will push up inflation in the US, and harm consumers and producers there, and the global economy. However, Republicans are now embodying the economics of destroyers like Juan Peron, who helped take Argentina from being a rich country to being a poor one, through this sort of nonsense. It will only be made worse by the EU and other developed countries responding in kind.
However, it is the moral depravity of the line on Ukraine which deserves the most approbrium.
There is no morality in surrendering to an aggressor all that it has won, so you have "peace" while it rebuilds its armed forces, rearms, and at the same time your erstwhile ally has blackmailed you into signing a predatory deal to hand over resources for the sake of vague promises of security. Ukraine doesn't want to do that, but the new appeasers do.
The claim Trump makes about wanting to be even-handed between Russia and Ukraine is a complete moral inversion. Whilst he has been excoriating about Zelensky, he has said nothing negative at all about Putin or the behaviour of Russia. He has said little about what Russia should do, and little about what the US will do if Russia doesn't stop fighting. He has only demanded that Ukraine stop.
He talks of Ukraine gambling with World War Three which is absurd, given Ukraine alone, with ample military supplies has taken the war to a stalemate - stalemate with Russia, because Russia's fighting capabilities are woeful. Without nuclear weapons, Russia would be easily overwhelmed with Western power, and pushed back. Indeed given the US also has nuclear weapons, it could have simply declared it was controlling Ukrainian airspace given:
Russian military attack on a civilian airliner
Ukrainian Government invitation to protect it.
Would Russia really have launched a nuclear attack at that point, with the US drawing a clear line that it was defending the territorial integrity of the remainder of Ukraine from air power?
Who was gambling with World War Three the non-nuclear armed Ukraine trying to defend itself from a nuclear power??
The claims about NATO expansion being provocative are only claims that are echoed by hardcore communists, who pretend that NATO was a project to attack their beloved eastern bloc, not one to defend liberal democracies from it, or from fascist nationalists, who can't believe that countries that spent half a century under the jackboot of the Soviet Union (which they once professed to loathe) would want to be free of Russian imperialism forever more.
Of course Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia etc. do not want their independence threatened by an aggressive Russia - again - and if you dont think that is legitimate, then you're either a communist, or someone, like Hitler, who thinks you can make accommodations with a communist for your own political objectives. Hating the European Union or "globalists" is all one thing, but if anyone who claims to believe in sovereign borders, the right of states to control their territory and be independent, thinks surrendering Ukraine is consistent with that, then it shows it up for all it is - desperate tribalist support for a US Administration that doesn't care about your beliefs when it suits it.
If territorial integrity of sovereign states doesn't matter to Ukraine, then maybe it doesn't matter anywhere that the Trump Administration doesn't care about, and that includes any country in Europe, or Australia, or New Zealand etc etc.
Of course everyone wants the war to end. It could end tomorrow if Putin just decided to end it, and withdraw, but he's a psychopathic kleptocrat who feeds young Russian men (from poor backgrounds) and North Korean men to their deaths.
Ukraine has been successful in knocking out much of Russia's military strength including knocking out much of the Black Sea Fleet. Had it been armed more effectively it could have pushed back more inflicting more pain on Russia.
Trump doesn't like that though, because he wants economic relations with Russia.
Had Trump wanted to, he could have demonstrated strength against Russia and demanded concessions or significantly enhanced support for Ukraine, but instead he has demonstrated strength against Ukraine and made it into a supplicant, and emboldened Russia.
If the war ends soon, on the basis of Russia giving up little, and there being no substantial security guarantees for Ukraine (including US direct military support), then it will prolong the inevitable. Russia can spend a few years rearming, and use its renewed economic potential after sanctions are lifted by the US, to steal military capability and be ready for another attack. It knows the US wont do much, and it doesn't fear European power. At that point, the cost not just to the Europe, but the world of letting it be known that the US is isolationist and wont act to protect any nation states from attack by Russia, is going to be much higher than the tens of billions taken to bolster Ukraine.
Even Marine Le Pen is critical of Trump on Ukraine, because by and large, European countries want to sure of defence against the predatory criminal gangster state to the east, which treats its neighbours with impunity.
Perhaps a deal will be struck, perhaps not and Europe will do all it can to support Ukraine, regardless, it is now a time for small countries everywhere to acknowledge that it's all on now - the US doesn't care if you are attacked, you have to fend for yourselves with any other allies.
On 23rd June, the UK will vote on whether to remain in or leave the EU. I'm voting to leave the EU, and believe that, on balance, those who believe in individual liberty including free trade should strongly support leaving the EU.
Bizarrely, Prime Minister David Cameron, having campaigned
for a referendum, is now claiming that a vote for the UK to leave would trigger
recession, economic catastrophe and even risk future war.He’s been asked why he bothered putting the
UK through such a risk, particularly since only months ago he said the UK would
“do ok”.Now both the Tory Government,
most of the Labour Party and virtually all Liberal Democrats, Scottish and
Welsh Nationalists and the Greens are all campaigning to remain in the EU,
whereas the campaign to leave is led by Boris Johnson,Michael Gove, nearly half
of Conservative MPs, a handful of Labour MPs and UKIP.
The two main planks of the Remain camp are first that
leaving the EU Single Market would damage the economy, and they cite many
economists, the IMF, World Bank and OECD who all support this, along with some
major business leaders and companies.The second claim is that leaving the EU “lessens Britain” and isolates
it, and means the UK loses influence.
The Leave campaign has a few key messages.One is that it will save £350m a week from
not contributing to the EU (although that excludes receipts from EU programmes
to the UK and Thatcher’s rebate, which could be removed at any time).Secondly, is that leaving the EU will return
sovereignty to the British Government, rather than the EU, which passes laws,
even if all British MEPs oppose them, imposing them on the UK.Thirdly, is concern that immigration cannot
be effectively controlled whilst there is free movement and full rights for all
EU citizens to reside in the UK.
For a libertarian, the EU referendum does mean a trade
off.Indeed, the only two elements of the EU that are pro-freedom are the single market and free movement of people.
EU Membership does provide a single market of over 550
million people, for goods if not for services.However, it is a customs union that is highly protectionist, and has for
decades been one of the biggest objectors to global free trade in agriculture
and in many services at the WTO, particularly because France is consistently
resistant to trade liberalisation.Much
is made of the EU signing “trade deals” with other countries, but it rarely
includes services and never includes agriculture.Nick Clegg likes to describe the many years
and reams of paper needed for the EU to reach trade agreements with the likes
of Canada, as if this is the norm (and a burden the UK would have to bear with
other countries if outside the EU).Yet
this is quite unnecessary.New Zealand
and Australia agreed on free trade (CER) in less than four years, with a
relatively simple agreement.The only
reason free trade agreements become complex is when one of the parties wants
exemptions – not actually wanting free trade.
The second libertarian element of the EU is the free
movement of people.The ability to cross
borders virtually unimpeded is of significant value, but it is unconditional. No EU Member states have the ability to shut out other EU citizens if they have been convicted of any serious offences. I am not from the camp that believes that free movement within the EU is inherently bad, but I do believe countries should be able to exclude foreign nationals who are proven violent criminals. The UK's immigration problems are in part, its own fault. Its health system is the world's biggest civilian bureaucracy that makes feeble attempts to restrict non-national usage and asks nothing of users in terms of financial contributions. Anyone with legal residency in the UK has access to the welfare state (including generous tax credits for low income workers and child benefits), to taxpayer funded education for their children and access to publicly subsidised housing (indeed there is a "legal right" to housing in the UK, paid for by others).
In short, the UK has a welfare state edifice that is attractive to migrants with low skills, especially coming from much poorer countries with inferior health, education and housing provision. If it wants to reduce immigration, it ought to look in the mirror.
Furthermore, as journalist Rod Liddle said at a Spectator hosted event on June 13th, eastern Europeans don't pose an existential threat to western civilisation or to the values of individual freedom that give cause to be concerned about Islamism. As much as some are concerned about Polish migration to Britain, they integrate, they embrace the values of a developed Western liberal democracy, they set up businesses, they are not demanding media not offend them with threats of violence. Notwithstanding the distortions caused by the UK's wider welfare state, I am not concerned about migration from eastern European, as long as prudent measures are made to exclude convicted violent criminals.
However, the freedom of movement and freedom of trade within the single market do not, for me, outweigh what's wrong with the EU:
- It is a massive exercise in regulation and legal control on almost all areas of the economy. The EU has over 10,000 Directives on anything from standards for fruit and vegetables, to blowtorches, to light bulbs, to employment. It is a huge corporatist system that imposes major compliance costs on businesses, restricting new entry and restraining innovation. Most explicitly, the EU has prohibited the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture, ensuring that research and development of GM technology outside laboratories is based in the US and Asia, not Europe.
- Its budget is dominated by the protectionist racket known as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP inflates the price of food for Europeans by heavily restricting imports from more efficient producers from many countries, including New Zealand, and subsidises overproduction in Europe which is then exported undermining market prices in other countries including poor producers in developing countries. The CAP impoverishes farmers in poor countries, whilst the EU engages in pious virtue signalling about how much it cares about inequality. The CAP itself isn't even equal in Europe, as it would have gone bankrupt had eastern European producers been subsidised at the same rates as those in western Europe, so perversely farmers in the EU's poorest countries (e.g. Bulgaria) receive subsidies one-third lower than those in its richest countries (e.g. Luxembourg).
- The EU takes £10 billion a year of British taxpayers' money more than it returns (and most of what it returns is to prop up farmers, to fund research projects or pious regional development projects). That is money currently borrowed from future taxpayers. It should end to help balance the budget. The ludicrous idea that this is the "price for accessing the single market" is absurd. Free trade does not need to be accompanied by massive subsidy schemes for small parts of the EU economy or politically motivated infrastructure, research or vanity projects (such as Galileo - the EU's complete duplication of the US GPS system, under the nonsensical basis that the US might "shut it down one day"). Furthermore, the majority of EU Member States are not net contributors, and until the past three years neither was France (primarily because it takes so much back in subsidies to prop up its 19th century farming sector).
- The EU is fundamentally authoritarian in instinct, having contempt for the democratically expressed choices of EU Member State voters (the EU President recently said that certain political parties would "not be allowed" to have power if they won elections in EU Member States, such as the Freedom Party in Austria). The EU's utter failure to provide any discipline on spending in some Euro-member states and contempt for popular revolt at the resulting economic collapse reflects its distance from the concerns of Europeans. Notably, it has taken few steps to address Hungary's creeping authoritarianism as its government subverts much of its media to support its own propaganda.
- Members of the European Parliament have no powers at all to introduce new legislation including legislation to abolish existing Directives. Only the European Council can introduce draft legislation into the European Parliament, and the Council is comprised of people appointed by Member State Governments. The closest the EU gets to accountability is that MEPs can vote to oppose the passage of draft directives, but none can propose their own new legislation.
- The European Commission budget has been found to be materially in error every year for the past 18 years, most recently by 3.9%, or around €5 billion. This is in part because of the complexities of its spending programs there is considerable scope for fraud and mistake. Never mind, the EU just keeps asking for more money.
- The EU never cuts its budget, ever. Every year it asks for more and more, it never ceases to undertake any functions, it never seeks to hand back powers to Member States. It grows inexorably. Ten years ago it didn't have a common Foreign Policy, it is now discussing haviuniong an EU Army. Bear in mind this growth continues in spite of it telling the likes of Greece and Spain that they need to cut spending to balance their budgets.
- The EU falsely claims it is responsible for peace in Europe amongst its Member States, ignoring not only the role of NATO in deterring war with the Soviet Union, but also the more fundamental principle that liberal democracies don't go to war with each other. The EU got in the way of addressing the war in the Balkans in the 1990s as it opposed letting the Bosnian Muslims arm themselves to respond to the Serbian ultra-nationalist genocide being led by Radovan Karadzic, it has been divided over Ukraine.
- The EU attracts mediocre political appointees to have considerable power over us all. The UK supplied the second Foreign Minister, Catherine Ashton, a Labour Party member, unionist and former peer (i.e. never elected) who had no foreign policy background. Failed UK Labour Leader Neil Kinnock built a long career for himself and his family in the EU.
- The EU has attacked free speech by requiring Google to remove content from searches that EU citizens specifically request as being the "right to be forgotten" . More recently it has sought to have a common approach to "hate speech", including a call to restrict "disrespectful public discourse". Fuck off you arseholes.
- The EU project's ultimate end game is a European superstate with power over taxation, national budgets and a massive programme to "harmonise" the regulation of all industries and sectors as one. This superstate will not be interested in reducing what it does, granting more freedoms to its citizens and reducing its burden on taxpayers, rather the contrary.
Supporters of the Vote Leave campaign have produced this movie below, which is being freely distributed.
I have already cast my postal vote to leave and no, I don't take the views of President Obama, John Key, the IMF, World Bank, UN Secretary General or others into account. I don't expect any government or any international organisation to risk their own trade and relationships with the world's largest economy (the EU) by supporting the UK leaving. Most bizarrely, it is odd that President Obama would ask the UK to stay in a political union that the US itself would never bind itself to even if it could, given the US itself refuses to sign up to many international treaties because it doesn't want its sovereignty restrained.
However, let's be very clear what leaving the UK does not mean:
The campaign to leave the EU is not led by those who want the UK to be isolated and protectionist: Unlike the opposition to the UK's original EEC Membership in 1975, those who lead the campaign to leave the EU now are not primarily socialists who feel threatened by foreign competition. They are advocates of free and open trade with the rest of the world. They are dominated by concerns that UK's national sovereignty is eroded by the EU and that the EU is wasteful, sclerotic, inefficient and dismissive of individual freedoms and people's concerns about it.
Leaving the EU is not "ending co-operation": Over 160 countries in the world co-operate on a vast number of matters. Switzerland, Norway and Iceland are not in the EU, all trade freely with it and work with it and each other and other states, without being tied to the EU project.
Leaving the EU is not racist: By illiberal-leftwing standards, the EU itself may be deemed racist with its trade policy that harnesses protectionism and European taxpayers' money to harm producers in developing countries. Those advocating for Brexit want an immigration policy that does not favour EU citizens from non-EU citizens, which would appear to be anything but racist.
Leaving the EU is not "leaving" or "turning our back on Europe": The EU is not Europe, it is a political-customs union project. The UK has been at the heart of advocating values of freedom, civil liberties, liberal democracy, rule of law and separation of powers in Europe for much longer than any other countries in Europe. It is understandable why some countries with recent totalitarian pasts would see the EU as a project that may enable them to move on from unspeakable horrors and oppression, but the UK does not have such a path. UK outside the EU would trade, travel and work closely with European countries, with continued migration and investment, it simply wouldn't be shackled to how the EU wants Europeans to interact.
Leaving the EU is not seeking a return to a "golden age": Far from it, it is seeking to regain full sovereignty over UK laws to create a more dynamic, outward looking Britain that isn't dependent on the EU for freer trade with the rest of the world. No one harks back to Empire, some say Brexit will enable trading relationship with the Commonwealth to be revitalised, but few see a future of self-sufficiency and exclusion.
So I have voted to Leave. I know if it happens, the pound will drop, the FTSE100 will drop and there will be panic. I also know that there are strong calls for Brexit to mean a significant toughening of immigration policy, which I largely oppose. I also know there is chance the UK will be blocked from the single market for some time, as the EU and major EU Member States seek to punish the UK for leaving, rather than look at themselves as to why that might be.
However, I am also hopeful and optimistic that the world's 5th largest economy can be more outward looking, can liberalise its economy, can reprioritise its net contribution to the EU by cutting its budget deficit and replacing the subsidy programmes it receives now and phase them out. I am hopeful that the UK can show the EU that it should be more dynamic, open and prosperous, stimulating the sort of reforms EU Member States desperately need. I am also hopeful that the charlatan, the PR spin doctor Prime Minister, David Cameron, can finally retire, and the UK can have a government that doesn't look like the Labour Party stayed in power after 2010.
Before I start, for the avoidance of doubt, let's get three things clear:
1. I'm not a Christian, and I find some elements of Christianity to be not only irrational but also immoral.
2. I'm not gay.
3. I fully support two people of the same sex being able to get married, just like two of the opposite sex, and I find fear or hatred of people because they are homosexual/lesbian/bisexual to be both irrational and immoral.
So from a libertarian perspective, the Asher's Bakery case in Northern Ireland is an interesting one.
The long and the short of it is that a gay rights activist in Northern Ireland asked a bakery to bake a cake with a pro-gay marriage slogan on it, and the bakery objected because the owners oppose gay marriage, because of their religious beliefs.
While some on the left push the increasingly discredited "Fair Trade" propaganda against both economic theory and practice, it is appropriate to argue for free trade and highlight what protectionism means (and noting that the Oxfam, Fairtrade, left/green economic deluders tend to spend little time on these issues) and what it does.
Export subsidies are one of the more obvious and stupid forms of protectionism. The WTO prohibits export subsidies for industrial products, but it is not prohibited for agricultural exports, which is unsurprising since both the EU and the US apply them.
Export subsidies undermine the international market prices of goods, whilst stimulating production by the less efficient producers in the countries providing the subsidies to their producers, but undermining the production and the revenue of the more efficient producers in countries unable or unwilling to take money from other taxpayers to prop up agriculture. In short, export subsidies in agriculture undermine agricultural production in the developing world and so undermine their economies, which typically are more reliant on primary production than the countries with export subsidies.
By enabling inefficient producers to undercut efficient ones, it wastes resources, which any environmentalist ought to oppose, as well as being fundamentally inequitable. Not only does it take from taxpayers in the countries that pay the subsidies to rent-seeking agricultural producers (and it is the larger and wealthier producers that get the biggest subsidies), but it mean efficient producers lose out in poorer countries.
Before you blame the USA for it, the EU's current WTO commitments on agricultural export subsidies are for subsidies 15 times greater than that of the USA.
This is a European Union led problem - it is the European Union using its taxpayers' money in a way that impoverishes farmers in poorer countries, whilst calling on its Member States to increase official aid to developing countries.
It's a simple step, it should be the first priority in any new WTO trade round (if the Obama Administration bothered to care), it should be a priority for those activists, who think poverty actually matters. Not trendy, slogan driven, producer rent-seeking schemes like "Fair Trade". Oddly enough, they get agitated by the "unfairness" of prices set by demand and supply, not the "unfairness" of state intervention to favour their own.
