Free Trade: Less Government Everywhere Means Cheaper Stuff Here (and Everywhere)

More government means more expensive everything. Every second and penny spent paying government taxes and complying with government regulations – raises the prices of the goods and services people proffer.

And more government makes it more difficult to innovate – to create and improve goods and services. Innovation is delayed or outright prevented – because the time and money wasted on government could be much better spent developing the next great things.

More government also inflates the prices of everything trade. It ain’t free trade – if governments are involved.

“Trade Wars” actually aren’t about trade – they are about government trade policy.

If peoples are trading freely, there isn’t a “War” – there’s commerce. The “Wars” only happen when governments get involved – placing tariffs, regulations and subsidies in the way of the flow.

It becomes a regulatory arms race. A government imposes another subsidy or tax. So several others in response impose new subsidies and taxes of their own. Lather, rinse, repeat.

A horrendous example of government policy Trade Wars – is all things farm.

(O)ur Farm Bill – which warps our market – has warped the world’s as well. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) helped beget an eight-decade-long international regulatory arms race.

Other produce-producing nations saw our lattice-work panoply of tariffs and subsidies – and felt compelled to match them. And then exceed them….

So what we now have is a global lattice-work panoply of tariffs and subsidies. A thicket that grows ever thicker – as each next government tries to outdo the last.

How bad has it become? Just on the government money side?

Check out Texas Tech’s Foreign Subsidies Database. The Executive Summary lists the omni-directional government infusion interference:

• All countries, both industrialized and developing, support their agriculture sectors, but use vastly divergent policy tools and combinations of tools. Most use guaranteed minimum prices and import tariffs to protect domestic producers.

• Industrialized country governments are moving from price supports toward decoupled direct income payments.

• Developing countries supplement their price support programs with input subsidies, which are excluded from calculations of the Aggregate Measure of Support (AMS) by the World Trade Organization (WTO), but are nonetheless trade distorting.

• Developing countries’ tariff protection is higher than that of industrialized countries.

• The use of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures to restrict imports are more frequent among developing countries than in developed countries.

That’s a mess.

Via: Red State

Continue Reading....

Chris Matthews Defending Hillary: FDR Was 'Secretive' and Turned Out Best President of 20th Century

Read more at NewsBusters | Wrapping up a segment dealing with fresh revelations from newly-released Hillary Clinton emails pertaining to  Benghazi, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews on Thursday night dutifully spun that Hillary's "secretive" nature was not a drawback but may in fact be a net positive, comparing her to  "secretive" and "manipulative" FDR, who, in Matthews's estimation, was America's best president of the 20th century, if not the entire history of the Republic.

Via: CNS News
Continue Reading....

The Four Freedoms: 75 Years of Liberal Betrayal

In the second half of the 2000s liberals did a fine job of blaming Bush for everything that went wrong in the US. His "neo-con" supporters, they asserted, were just as bad.

Now that President Obama and his signature legislation are a twin disaster the same opportunity beckons for conservatives. It's not just Obama, it's the whole liberal project that created this mess. So the road to 2016 involves discrediting Obama, but also the whole liberal ruling class.

A good place to start would be FDR's Four Freedoms, for when the campaign to elect the un-Obama kicks off in 2016 it will be 75 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled his Four Freedoms on January 6, 1941. In case you forgot, the freedoms were:

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Worship

Freedom from Want

Freedom from Fear

Have you ever thought about how the liberals have utterly betrayed the noble sentiments of the Four Freedoms?
Nothing personal here. It's just that all power corrupts, and liberal power corrupts absolutely.

Let us give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that, then and now, liberals believe what they say they believe in. Even so, for the sake of truth, justice and the American Way, we must look at the liberal record on the Four Freedoms.

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading....

Obama misunderstands wartime leadership

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt told his speechwriter Sam Rosenman, “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead — and to find no one there.”

For President Obama to have arrived at this place is uncomfortable but not unprecedented. Democratic majorities generally do not clamor for the application of violence in global affairs. Usually it is a president who sees a strategic problem requiring the use of force and must persuade his fellow citizens.

During his news conference following the Group of 20 summit in Russia, Obama’s reference to the example of FDR — trying to persuade a reluctant nation to help the British — was revealing. Roosevelt won the approval of historians by challenging, even circumventing, American resistance to war. His foreign-policy leadership consisted of opposing a shortsighted democratic consensus.

Obama is hardly the first peace candidate to push the nation toward conflict. Woodrow Wilson campaigned in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” During the 1940 election, Roosevelt was still promising, “Your sons will not go to war.” Yet both men skillfully made the transition to wartime leadership.

Obama affirmed in his news conferencethat he “was elected to end wars, not start them.” He then proceeded to show how unsuited his skills and strategies are to the task of beginning an armed conflict. His goal? To maintain an “international norm.” His current options? Not “appetizing.” His future methods? “Limited.” The level of opposition? “You know, our polling operations are pretty good.” His main argument? “I think that I have a well-deserved reputation for taking very seriously and soberly the idea of military engagement.”

Via: Washington Post

Continue Reading....

Barack Obama to hail himself as the new Franklin D. Roosevelt: President promises 'bold, persistent' leadership like FDR during the Great Depression

President Barack Obama will tonight lay out his case for being re-elected to a second term by comparing himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won an unprecedented three presidential elections and led America to recovery after the Great Depression.

He will say: 'And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades. It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.'

Obama will formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination, capping a week in which speeches from his wife Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton, the husband of his erstwhile rival, received widespread praise.

He will tell Americans: 'Our problems can be solved. Our challenges can be met. The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place.'

Roosevelt dominated American politics for the 12 years of his presidency and beyond. He is commonly recognised as the greatest Democratic president and, along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, one of the three greatest American presidents.

Not only did he bring America out of the depression, he oversaw the introduction of the New Deal social programmes, laid the foundations for the United Nations and led the country in the Second World War after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, dying just when victory was in sight.

Excerpts from tonight's speech released in advance showed that Obama would attempt to frame the election not as a referendum on his four-year term, during which unemployment has risen to 8.3 per cent, leaving more than 23 million Americans out of work, but as a choice between him and Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee.

'On every issue, the choice you face won’t be just between two candidates or two parties,' he was due to say. 'It will be a choice between two different paths for America. A choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.'

This November's election, he argued, will represent 'the clearest choice of any time in a generation' between two different visions.

Via: Mail OnLine

Continue Reading...