Posts Tagged ‘free trade’

Somebody Nancy Pelosi should meet

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

Nancy Pelosi has blocked the Columbia Free Trade Agreement from coming to a vote in Congress. This kills it for the year in spite of the fact that it was signed several years ago, then renogotiated to satisfy Democrat complaints. Here is a Washington Post interview with the president of Columbia. Maybe Nancy Pelosi should read it.

Eveyone knows this is an election year kabuki dance that Democrats must perform to satisfy dinosaur trade unions that, having killed off the US auto industry, is now after the rest of our export based economy. Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Mark Penn is the latest victim. This is insanity but Democrat politics has its own internal rhythm that does not require logic.

What Obama could have said

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

David Brooks is the faux right columnist in the NY Times. Much of the time his columns are weak and seem to be pleas for understanding to the hard left which will never accept any advice from a writer who defends Bush, even weakly. However, today he hit one out of the park. The Democrats have wrecked primary and secondary education with the teachers’ unions leading the way. Undergraduate education in Humanities is pretty much useless as the great western canon of literature and history is submerged in PC baloney. Even so, science and business lead to success for college graduates. We are the most prosperous and free society in the history of the world, but you wouldn’t know it from the New York Times. Bravo for Brooks who got it right this time.

How to make a recession into a depression

Monday, April 7th, 2008

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi has taken another Smoot Hawley step by blocking a vote on the Columbia trade agreement. The FARC Caucus in the Democratic party is still strong.

The White House has a comment about Pelosi and her rule changing.

MORE EVIDENCE: The Columbia FTA is important to Caterpillar which has 50,000 union jobs, but you’d never know it.

There is an unending debate about just why the Great Depression occurred. We have had financial panics ever since the colonies declared independence. Severe ones occurred in 1893 and 1907. There was a severe recession after World War I.

One school of thought believes that the Glass-Steagall Act, that set up the Federal Reserve Bank, was responsible because the Fed panicked and contracted the money supply just when the need for capital was greatest. Amity Schlaes, in her book The Forgotten Man, believes it was the ill-advised actions of Hoover and Roosevelt that tipped us over the edge. Everyone, however, agrees that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which Hoover signed in 1930, was a big part of the problem.

One thousand twenty-eight economists in the United States, organized by Paul Douglas, Irving Fisher, James TFG Wood, Frank Graham, Ernest Patterson, Henry Seager, Frank Taussig, and Clair Wilcox, and representing the “Who’s Who” of the profession, signed a petition asking President Hoover to veto the legislation (New York Times, 5 May 1930)

Now, we have the other political party demanding a similar economic measure that will have similar effects on world trade. Fortunately, John McCain is speaking out against protectionism but a President Obama, in spite of his advisers, may do a Hoover and worsen the coming recession precipitously.

Santayana famously said, “Those who do not remember history, are condemned to repeat it.”