Back to Work

Many people, including many who did not support Trump, have been enjoying a few weeks of euphoria over an election which spared the nation from Hillary Clinton and a continuation of Obama’s policies. That is completely understandable and appropriate. Churchill’s comment about the exhilaration of being shot  at with no result applies pretty well here. However nearly two months of that are enough.   Now it is time for people who care about liberty and liberal values to get down to the business of opposing  the bad parts of Trump’s plans and agenda (while of course supporting the good ones as one would with anyone else).

Two obvious places to start are his threats of tariffs and trade wars and the scheme to deport all illegal aliens. There are things in some agreements on international trade which could stand improvements and there are certainly things done by some  foreign governments  in regard to industrial espionage, subsidies, cartels,  and theft of intellectual property which are egregious. There are some types of manufacturing which  have largely or completely disappeared from this country and not always for purely economic reasons. To that extent Trump has a point.  However, the notion that international trade is intrinsically harmful  is dangerously wrong. (Trump’s  claim that America manufactures little or nothing anymore is completely  false as anyone could learn easily by looking at statistics from, for example, the FRED  web site of the St. Louis Federal Reserve.  Total American real manufacturing output has almost doubled in the last forty years,  though it has only recently regained  the levels reached before large  declines in 2008-2009.)  If Trump wants to aid the competitiveness of potential American manufacturers  in areas where production has moved to foreign countries without harming American consumers in the process, he should consider easing burdens of taxation and regulatory costs, rather than going to  thirty five percent tariffs or bullying individual companies into making economic decisions for political reasons.  It is not only that protectionism makes little or no economic sense.  It also makes little or no ethical sense. In the absence of coercion from criminals or governments, a  trade happens only when all parties  to it believe they benefit from it. People should be free to make such choices. Foreigners are people too and have the same right  to  offer their goods and services to willing American buyers as American citizens do.

Many people have concluded  that deporting ten or so million people is impractical.  It strikes me as also a bad idea, irrespective of its impracticality.  For many years governments run by both Democrats and Republicans have at least tacitly accepted and often welcomed illegal immigrants – granting them a sort of implicit amnesty.  Many illegal aliens have lived in the Unites States for years as productive members of society.  A large percentage of them have children who are American citizens. Trump is right about gaining control of the borders and stopping  illegal immigration. This country cannot absorb all the people who would be better off here than where they are living. The economists who warn  that open borders and free immigration,  while good ideas in fully free economies,  are incompatible with welfare states make a good point.  Illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes should be deported after serving their time in jail. None of that justifies sending cops in to hunt down and deport  millions of people who have done nothing intrinsically  wrong and have broken only the immigration laws.   I can see reasons to deny citizenship since illegal aliens have not followed the laws concerning acquiring it, but granting some sort of permanent resident alien status in most cases seems a good idea and a compromise that would work.

One can also be concerned about  the so-called war on police.  Conservatives are right in claiming officials in Obama’s administration were prejudiced against  local police and tended to blame cops first and announce findings of racial prejudice on often shaky or spurious  evidence.  Excusing calls to kill police and burn down cities was disgraceful. Trump was right to say law and order mattered. The danger is  that a Trump administration may go too far in supporting your local police.  Cops have a lot of power, and some of them abuse it.  The federal government should be vigorous in preventing  and punishing violations of people’s rights by local authorities. 

Besides any particular issues  we have had a harmful  expansion of presidential power and authority in the last fifteen years from Bush and especially  Obama. Trump should use executive and bureaucratic orders to cancel or reverse Obama’s and his administration’s harmful or inappropriate decrees. He should not use them to enact his own agenda.  We need fewer not more attempts to  govern by pen, phone, bureaucratic declaration, and executive order and more respect for the legal and constitutional limits on the power of the executive branch.  Congress should pass laws restraining the powers of agencies and the president  to operate by fiat. If Trump appreciates the need for such restraint, he has pretty well kept it to himself.   He will probably need to be held in check.