Tag: trade

A Twitter Digression on Trade and China

This week I saw an absolutely horrendous take on Twitter by Chris Arnade and felt compelled to discuss it. This is partially because the positions are incorrect, but also because his discussion itself was in bad faith and actively worsens our dialogue. Are there bad takes on Twitter every minute? Yes, but hey, I saw this one.

Here is the thread:

First, let’s start with the object-level fact that hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty in China. The intentions of the advocates of free trade isn’t relevant to this fact, what’s relevant is whether a particular policy improved the well being and life expectancy of millions of people. This is equivalent to claiming Jonas Salk was only in it for the name recognition, and therefore, we shouldn’t have used the polio vaccine.

Next, Arnade is simply wrong about the intentions of his political opponents, claiming they only support free trade because of greed. He then obfuscates the target of his accusations by using the ever popular term “elites”. Free traders have been talking about the moral benefits of trade forever. Friedman wrote Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, 10 years before Nixon’s visit to China, and The Economist was founded to repeal the Corn Laws in 1843. Saying Milton Friedman was defending free trade just to make money off of China’s market liberalizations decades later is just lazy argumentation.

So Arnade is wrong about their intentions, but are these even the “elites”? As far as I can tell Chris doesn’t have a good definition of elites. I noted in the past:

He claimed on his interview on EconTalk, that while elites are abandoning faith, it remains an important aspect of life to more everyday people. This divide is not borne out by the data. Income doesn’t predict church attendance, and according to Gallup, the difference in church attendance between college educated and non-college educated is within the margin of error. If you want things that predict church membership, you should use age (young people are less religious) or political ideology (those identifying as “conservative” are far more likely to go to church than those calling themselves “liberal”).

If Arnade doesn’t have a good definition of elites, then it seems pretty duplicitous to then claim “elites” have any particular position since we can’t identify who he is talking about. Even if such a group existed, surely there would be many different positions and ideas within this group. Not for Chris though, everyone in this group is one in the same. And it seems especially malicious to then claim that not only does this group with no definition exist, but they have specific stated incorrect claims! In fact, Arnade has identified these claims from an imaginary group as fake and then reveals the “true” beliefs which are, of course, simply greed. This is not just a strawman, ladies and gentleman, but indeed strawwomen and strawchildren too.

It’s plausible that someone could have disagreements with free traders, but just ignoring their arguments and claiming they’re only after money is a terrible way to learn and improve our understandings of the world. We should be engaging with each other’s ideas sincerely, not attributing hidden values to people we disagree with. I guess I find this especially upsetting because EconTalk, Russ Roberts’ podcast, does such a good job of emphasizing those values of charity and understanding, and Arnade was recently a guest on that podcast. To see someone who was treated very charitably turn around and be so underhanded on Twitter is quite disappointing.

Let’s return to China. Arnade discusses a “deal” where the U.S. allowed human rights abuses hoping that democracy would follow. I know of no one who has ever said that. In fact, the opposite occurred: the Cultural Revolution killed 500,000 people, ending in 1976 and following the Great Leap Forward which killed some 18 million people in the lowest estimates. Since trade liberalizations began, nothing on that scale has occurred again.

The interest in China from Nixon was as a tool in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Democracy was really not the goal. Moreover, the U.S. didn’t dictate to China to liberalize its economy, the market liberalizations were largely from within Deng Xiaoping’s government. In fact, I’m not really sure the U.S. would even be able to extract human rights improvements through protectionist policies. What is the model we would base it on? Cuba? Iran? North Korea? Venezuela? All have become wonderful bastions of human rights following American sanctions.

Also, I should bring up the simple libertarian critique that even if you have the perfect policy, the perfect knowledge of exactly how a foreign government will react to sanctions and trade agreement details, government is not an impartial executor of policy. Democratic forces and interest groups will always mutate policy as it passes through government, and it will not be implemented in the idealized fashion you might like. For example, what does the phrase “U.S. foreign policy human rights record” conjure up?

It’s true that China has not become a democracy, while many foreign policy types certainly believed it could happen, particularly in the 90s. Chris seems to think he predicted this outcome (not cited). Suppose you knew this, would you change policy? In a choice between a poorer China without democracy and a richer China without democracy, it seems we should choose the richer one because, you know, we want good things for all humans, not just people who live in the same country as us. 

Finally, let’s get to the economics here. There is no “us” who “exported our factories”. Individual firms make decisions in a complex economy. And those decisions have been that as a percentage of the total, manufacturing jobs peaked in the 40s prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China:

Arnade seems to understand that as he cites the recent scandal in the NBA where the Houston Rockets GM tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protesters, and quickly deleted it under a firestorm. Yet, Arnade switches between U.S. trade policy, governed by Congress (allegedly), and private firms making profit maximizing decisions without bothering to differentiate them.

It’s unclear exactly how Arnade wanted U.S. policy to intervene to stop private firms from making their own decisions. He cites an upcoming book, but provides no details. He also cites anti-labor policy, and I have heard similar discussions from economist Noah Smith, and many others associated with the new neoliberal movement. My problem is that given all the weird deceitfulness and strawmanning, I have no reason to trust Chris when we finally get to the policy discussion. I agree with him that the NBA or Blizzard caving to the Chinese government is a bad thing, but saying more robust industrial policy would have changed that is a non-sequitur.

Moreover, there are still tons of benefits from trade with China. The smartphone revolution changed the way we interacted with the world, and mostly in good ways I believe. This happened in part because of Chinese manufacturing allowing anyone to buy a highly complex piece of technology for cheap. On the other hand, technologies we have a dimmer view on today, like social media, are entirely U.S. grown.

There are problems in the world today, but we need to improve our level of dialogue if we want to solve them. Refusing to engage with well known arguments that critique your position and instead going on uncharitable Twitter threads is something we should avoid.

Things Mars Can Export

Imagine an economy on Mars or the Moon. Some people move there, excited about the chance to live on the new frontier of human development. They set up shop and start providing services and goods to each other. They’ll need jobs like metallurgist, construction worker, physicist, farmer, material scientist, physician, etc. The technician with the 3D printer will trade with the computer repairwoman who will trade with the doctor who will trade with the solar panel producer. Certainly very early colonies won’t do much trading and work more as a cohesive unit, with specific team members and job duties, running as a ship’s crew or military base more than a small town. But eventually once the outpost becomes big enough, trade will occur.

What will they use for money? Well, it’s not the point of this post, but I’d like to take a moment for speculation anyway. It’s possible that the centralized group that creates the space colony will see this problem ahead of time and establish their own currency. But it wouldn’t take much for someone to introduce a simple Bitcoin fork to create their own blockchain. Such a currency would only require an application running on a computer, something the colony would likely have lots of. I’ve written before that Bitcoin isn’t that great of a currency at present, but it does have benefits if your local currency is already pretty bad, see Venezuela. On Earth it functions as a floor beneath which local currencies can no longer do worse than. However, on Mars, the local currency would have a lot of uncertainty surrounding it. Maybe a bank has been set up, but why would people trust the bank? It doesn’t have a long history of trustworthy monetary policy like some Earth central banks do.

Suppose SpaceX sets up a Martian colony and creates a bank to hold everyone’s dollars. It’s too long to wait to ping back to Earth (average message/reply round trip is 6-40 minutes) to transfer Earth currency, so you’re left with trusting SpaceX’s bank that they won’t mismanage the currency, even though SpaceX doesn’t have any experience managing currency. Well, what if some enterprising people come over with a “MarsCoin” clone of Bitcoin, running a blockchain on Mars? You can send the code to Earth for audit, then run the code yourself on a local network of servers. If the block time is lower than it takes for a return ping to Earth (almost always true even if you’re using the 10 minute blocks of Bitcoin, which could be shortened), then you have a decentralized, trusted currency that’s much simpler than relying on distant Earth institutions or unproven Martian ones. Of course, then you need a special interplanetary blockchain to move currency between Earth and Mars with a very slow block speed, but we’re getting off on a tangent.

We have established that there will be a way to trade on Mars and between Mars and Earth. Mars will obviously have things it needs to buy from Earth, like difficult to manufacture parts, engineering and consulting services, and likely entertainment. But what will they be able to export to Earth? A country that can only import goods probably can’t sustain itself, unless there was positive immigration. We can thus treat reasons to immigrate to Mars as part of the answer to what Mars can export. I have compiled a list of possible ways the Martian economy can maintain a stable exchange rate with Earth.

Science

Science is the clear primary export of Mars today. As Robert Zubrin states in this excellent video, we believe Mars had liquid water on its surface for a long time, perhaps a billion years. On Earth, life showed up much sooner than a billion years after liquid water appeared. If we go to Mars and find evidence of life, that would help prove that the development of life is pretty common in the universe. On the other hand, if we don’t find much evidence of life, that could help point out that life isn’t very common on in the universe. Evidence of current or past life, could also help us determine whether all life is similar to that of life on Earth, using DNA to create amino acids and so on. These questions are “…real science. This is fundamental questions that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years.”

From an economic standpoint, it’s clear that scientists on Earth are willing to pay billions of dollars for this data. They might send their own scientists to Mars, which would count as positive immigration, or they might hire Martians to conduct the science for them, but it’s clear that scientific interest in Mars is worth billions. It’s also worth mentioning that other celestial bodies would also have this benefit, the Moon likely less so than Mars, and Jupiter’s moons perhaps similarly valuable.

Tourism

Space tourism also seems like an important industry for a space colony, although perhaps not Mars. Andy Weir’s Artemis takes place on the Moon and space tourism is an important export industry. Tourists visit the Apollo 11 landing site and jump around at 1/6 Earth gravity. It seems likely that similar tourism might function on Mars, although there are serious limits. For example, the trip to Mars takes months, would occur in essentially zero-g, and usually is only done one way every two years. Large rooms with windows would seem both vital for any tourism industry and highly impractical without radiation shielding. Vacationing for a week on Mars wouldn’t be practical, unlike taking a week or two week vacation to the Moon. Perhaps a two year long sabbatical would appeal to some people, but probably not most. A more efficient transportation system, such as an ion drive ship between the planets might reduce the travel time or allow for interplanetary travel even when the planets are not close in their orbits. But until then, tourism is likely to be very limited.

Martian Souvenirs

If tourism is limited, perhaps actual Martian rocks will be more highly valued. Those might be much simpler to ship to a mass audience on Earth. Given the monopoly Martians would have on this industry, they could theoretically charge a hefty markup. This is, of course, in addition to the scientific relevance the rocks would have. On the less positive side, there may be regulatory issues for bringing alien rocks to Earth. Fears of alien bacteria that could kill everyone on Earth might cause prohibitions. Such a threat seems unlikely, but import bans are often irrational.

Reduced Launch Costs

Of all the rocky places in the solar system to launch a rocket, the surface of Venus with its Earth-like gravity, sulfuric acid rain, and insane heat, is probably the worst one. But Earth is a close second. Rocket launches must accelerate out of the “gravity well” of wherever their launch site is and then expend the energy needed to get to their target transfer orbit. Escaping the gravity well is very difficult on Earth’s surface. The Apollo program required very little fuel to get off the Moon’s surface because the gravity was so reduced (and the Moon has no atmosphere). Thus, the energy needed to get off of other rocky surfaces in the solar system is much less than Earth. Mars also orbits further out from the sun, which means you also need less energy to get to a transfer orbit to the asteroid belt or outer solar system. Thus, one economic benefit would be to offer Mars as a cheaper launching point for outer solar system exploration.

However, if you need to first bring an entire rocket and fuel to Mars before departing for your eventual target, you’re better off just leaving from Earth directly without dipping into the shallower, but still significant Martian gravity well. For this to be valuable, you’d need to be able to build the rocket on Mars, which seems much further off than the other ideas discussed here, or you’d have to create the fuel on Mars. This may be possible; SpaceX’ plan is to use the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere and water ice on or near the surface to produce methane and oxygen as rocket fuel. One might also be able to find an asteroid or comet with water ice, carbon dioxide, or even methane, and bring it into orbit around Mars or the Moon, avoiding having to accelerate it into and out of Earth’s gravity well. Rocket manufacturing could then use a combination of terrestrial, martian, or lunar parts and fuel, supplemented by materials already in orbit, or even manufacturing plants in orbit. This could be sustainable in the long term. Asteroid mining would be extremely lucrative, with perhaps tens of billions of dollars in potential profit. If an asteroid mining company believed Mars, or the Moon could save them launch costs, they would likely purchase property, bring equipment and employees, and thus improve the Martian trade balance.

Natural Resources

Mars also has an abundance of natural resources in various compounds where they may be more common than on Earth. These include halogens, organic compounds, and deuterium. The extent and speed at which these will become useful to export from Mars are unclear, but they may eventually be useful as a source closer to the outer solar system than Earth, due to the reduced launch costs. Editing note: I decided to add this as separate category later after discussing this post.

On-Site Entertainment Production

This is another odd case, but it may be more immediately plausible than launching exploratory rockets from Mars. The low gravity of Mars or the Moon would allow for a different type of videography, with actors that actually weigh less able to jump large distances. This could be literal as for science fiction films that need to take place in low gravity, or perhaps more creative and unusual projects that endeavor to take advantage of this location in ways we have not yet conceived of. Again, however, the Moon may be a more accessible location than Mars, given the length and difficulty of travel.

Medicine

From what we know about the human body in lower gravity environments, the health effects are largely negative. There may be the possibility that osteoarthritis would be improved by living in a low-g environment, but anyone who has that problem would likely be old and might suffer from other problems. However, the severity of injuries from falls would likely be much less in low-g environments, and perhaps high blood pressure would be less of an issue. Nonetheless osteoporosis is known to get worse in zero-g, and so astronauts are forced to do weightlifting regimens in space to try and maintain their bone density. It’s possible that if the osteoporosis could be combated, people who suffer from osteoarthritis might live more comfortable retirements on Mars or the Moon. They could likely never return to Earth though, as their heart and muscles would have become significantly weaker and would likely give out upon return to Earth. We need more research on the human body under low-gravity conditions to see what the long term medical effects are.

Law and Society

This is much more likely to be a reason for positive immigration than for exports. People who currently live under legal systems on Earth may be interested in moving to a different legal system not currently available on Earth. They may even want to start their own society. That is not currently possible on Earth, as states claim almost all land on Earth. Moving to Mars due to its nonexistent or only slightly existent legal system would bring with it a variety or related goals and ideas, such as chance to shape the cultural future of Mars. One can see the related desires of immigrants who moved to the Americas from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (and earlier, I suppose). This would also include people who wanted to live on the edge of human exploration or contribute to the project of humanity reaching other celestial bodies, and perhaps eventually other stars.

There are of course limits here as well. Any existing Martian colony would have its own law and rules that might be just as restrictive as Earth, especially given the harsh conditions and lack of natural resources on Mars. To create a legal system and society on Mars, any group would require a massive amount of resources, equipment, and specialized knowledge, essentially creating a whole new colony. Could such a move possibly be cheaper than simply establishing a place on Earth? It’s hard to say. The problem on Earth is not just money and resources, but confronting states who have access to military power.

Capital Flows

It should be pointed out for completeness’ sake that of course Mars could potentially export nothing, but still expand their economy as Martians did productive work for each other. Then could borrow money from Earth, invest it, and Earthers would see a positive return. This would counter the negative pressure on the Martian exchange rate from exports. If Martian investments were failing though, then Martian currency would likely become pretty worthless to Earthers, and they’d likely stop selling goods to Mars. We should thus note a financial crisis could be quite problematic!

Conclusion

Mars has a variety of goods it can export, although the only immediately available ones are likely Science, Society, and perhaps space rock souvenirs. Others may eventually become economically useful, but will likely take some time.

Picture: Public Domain Image, Global mosaic of 102 Viking 1 Orbiter images of Mars taken on orbit 1,334, 22 February 1980. NASA 

The Obama Presidency Was Bad

We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.

There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.

The A’s

Iran Nuclear Deal

So…there was only one thing I could give an A to. Even this A is very hesitant. We did give up a lot for this deal–the Iranian government is pretty awful and by unfreezing their assets, they got access to very large amounts of money. However, I don’t think there was much else to do. Unless Republicans actually wanted to declare war on Iran, this seems like the only way to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon.  Iran’s nuclear program will be prohibited from refining any uranium for 15 years, and this was accomplished without any military intervention whatsoever. That’s pretty excellent. Moreover, the average citizens of Iran matter as well and it is somewhat unfair to punish them with high inflation and economic hardship because their authoritarian government is irresponsible.  Cato expands more here.

The B’s

Trade

One of the most important accomplishments is that Obama’s administration worked to pass several free trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. He also tried to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, although he could have really pushed harder on these initiatives. Obama didn’t do a great job making the case for free trade and his signature deal was ultimately a failure; honestly, a B is generous here, and is more of a function of the importance of free trade more so than Obama’s actual impact. Also worth noting is that his rhetoric while campaigning was pretty vigorously anti-trade, so he should be commended for changing his mind on this.

Gay Rights

Obama ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but was still on the record as anti-gay marriage as late as 2012. Sure, public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly, but Obama basically waited until it was 50-50 to switch to the right side on this; the Libertarian Party has been on board with gay marriage since the 70s. He should also be applauded for essentially not getting in the way of the court case. I know that’s a low bar, but he could have fought it and tried to keep the DOMA. The other issue is that while this is excellent, the impact of gay marriage legalization is somewhat limited to people who can take advantage of it.

Cuba

The Cuban embargo was imposed over 50 years ago in a bid to quickly end Castro’s dictatorship on the island. It failed. 25 years after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, a president finally spent some political capital to remove an outdated institution. Trade embargoes harm populations, and trade embargoes on a country that has been crushed by horrific socialist economic policies are even more harmful. The president cannot remove the embargo, but everything he can do without Congress, Obama has done on this issue. Trade can bring countries together, and Obama took steps to build those bridges. If he had actually gotten the embargo lifted, this would be an A.

The C’s

Marijuana Legalization

And that’s it for the entirely positive! Marijuana’s big progress had basically nothing to do with Obama, and Obama actually started out fighting it, performing more federal raids on state legal marijuana dispensaries in his first term than Bush. Eventually the administration did make the decision not to continue attempts to enforce marijuana laws with federal police forces. While kind of obvious and not very impressive, this may turn out to be something we remember fondly during the long night of the Jeff Sessions era.

Healthcare

As an incredibly brief overview, the ACA is flawed because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with the healthcare system: a lack of market forces.  The laws of supply and demand create incentives for lower cost and higher quality care. Plastic surgery and lasik are not covered by insurance and thus must compete on price and quality and over time these areas have seen remarkable improvement with prices remaining the same or even dropping.

Our insurance system insulates both consumers and providers of healthcare from the market prices; consumers don’t pay for care, they don’t pay different prices at different places, and they often don’t even buy the insurance that does pay for care. Instead their employers pay for the thing that pays for their healthcare. And sometimes, if you go to a hospital, the insurance doesn’t really pay for care either, it pays the hospital in obfuscated and arcane ways, which in turn provides the doctors and actual equipment needed to provide care. It’s a complete mess.

The ACA did do some nice things like allow people with pre-existing conditions and people who didn’t get their healthcare through their employees and poor people to get health insurance. This is great, and any healthcare reform should strive to do that. However, by not addressing the price issue, they doomed these reforms. Things have sputtered along, but healthcare costs have kept rising, and now insurers are stuck with a disproportionate amount of sick people, needing to raise prices, which only drives away more healthy people. The death spiral was a predictable consequence (and indeed I did predict this in 2010 in a blog attached to my real name and thus will not be linking to here). Obamacare was not a poorly intended bill, but it was an incredible missed opportunity to actually fix the healthcare system. The only reason I didn’t give it a lower grade was because the system was so bad already, it’s hard to argue it was made that much worse.

Global Warming

Obama took steps to reduce climate change. Even if you’re not concerned about the most dire predictions of global warming, that’s probably a net benefit. He also was able to get China to sign onto the Paris Agreement. While not having legal punishments for countries who break their promises, it’s a solid negotiating achievement. However, Obama also implemented, largely by executive order, regulations on coal plants in the US that will have very little impact on carbon emissions. It’s also not at all market oriented, and therefore not particularly economically efficient. Additionally, in his first year in office, Obama had a chance to try and pass a more economically efficient carbon credit trading bill. Assuming climate change is as dire a threat as many say it is (I’m admittedly less worried), it seems to be a poor decision to spend political capital on other bills that did pass, especially something that was as flawed as Obamacare.

The Economy

The employment rate is lower than it has been in a long time, but the problem is this graph. Labor force participation has plummeted from 65% in the depths of the recession to around 62% now. The last time it was this low was before 1980. Since the current labor is around 160 million people, and we are at 62% participation, that means the cohort of the working age population is about 258 million. In 2009, unemployment was around 9%. With a labor force of 155 million people, that’s almost 14 million unemployed. Today with an unemployment rate of 4.7%, that’s only 7.5 million unemployed. However, looking at the people not in the labor force in 2009 there were 83.5 million not working but not unemployed. In 2017, there are 98 million not working but not unemployed. so unemployment dropped by almost 7 million, yet more than twice that many more people were staying out of the labor force entirely. The economy isn’t in free fall, but it’s not knocking it out of the park either, and this is 8 years after the recession. This isn’t entirely Obama’s fault, as the Federal Reserve is much more responsible for economic success overall, but the things Obama did have control over were abject failures: fiscal restraint, entitlement reform, and deregulation.

Immigration

Obama’s legacy on immigration liberalization is mixed. Unfortunately, as this is one of the more important issues in improving the world, a mixed record is disappointing. Obama deported more people than George Bush and he failed to pass any sort of comprehensive reform bill. Obviously, he couldn’t pass bills on everything, but this would have been a pretty important area to do so. Obama did however create an executive order delaying deportations for millions of illegal immigrants. This was a bit odd constitutionally, but with so many illegal immigrants in the United States, it would be impossible to deport them all anyway. Obama’s order simply prioritizes some over others, protecting children and parents of American citizens. This was certainly a good policy, but unfortunately Obama’s legacy in this area should have been so much better.

The D’s

Endless Wars

Obama is the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, to undeclared wars and bombings in Yemen and Pakistan, we have entered a new era of endless war. Libya is specifically horrifying: Obama chose to involve the American military in Libya unilaterally. He explicitly did not get authorization from Congress, and in fact Congress explicitly voted against a resolution to authorize his military involvement after the fact. That is a terrifying precedent to give Donald Trump.

The only reason this category is not an F is because of Obama’s continued reluctance to expand the US involvement in Syria.  Of course, he did this in the worst possible way, by drawing a line in the sand and then backing down from it but it’s undeniable that a larger American role in Syria would have involved the US in one of the largest, bloodiest civil wars of the last decade. Of course, we have not even touched the fact that American troops are in Iraq 14 years after the invasion, and many US contractors remain in Afghanistan 16 years after that invasion. Obama has still institutionalized war in way never before seen.

The F’s

Surveillance

I mean wow. How did we get here? If you want all the citatations, this Mashable article is a good start. The United States government engages in broad sweeps of Americans’ phone records through unconstitutional general warrants issued via a secret court that had no defense team, no oversight, and has only rejected a handful of warrants in its entire history. The NSA also had a program for collecting data on foreigners and Americans from major technology companies, as well as a massive database storing all of that information for later search. Every available method of siphoning data is apparently being used.  The NSA also invested heavily in ways to break internet encryption standards. They even paid $10 million to RSA to get them to set their default encryption algorithm to one that was fundamentally broken in one of their products. Most impressively, it turns out that the big phone record collection the NSA was conducting in total secret, that had no oversight and Senators couldn’t even talk about, it’s illegal according to a federal appellate court.

It was such a disaster that Congress eventually tried to pass a reform bill to fix Section 215 of the Patriot Act which is what the courts cited as the justification for these general warrants. Yet in the end, that bill was watered down to the point of uselessness, with Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul all voting against it due to its lack of real power. In fact, the bill extended the Patriot Act for several years. Obama’s legacy in this area is a total disaster, and he leaves an out of control intelligence agency with no oversight in the hands of a petty authoritarian. The NSA (and all agencies they share information with) knows intimate details about all of our lives, our communication patterns, and our digital existences. As we’ve written before, this is not good.

Transparency

Reason does a good job tearing the Obama administration apart over the “most transparent administration in history” line. Again, this area is such a disaster there are too many things to cover. We can start by discussing how just a month or two prior to the Edward Snowden revealing everything we talked about in the last section, DNI Clapper blatantly lied to a Senate committee about the government’s spying capability. Obama himself has hardly given any interviews to the press. His administration has had more than double the Espionage Act charges against whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Which is especially concerning since none of these were acts of espionage! These were legitimate problems that were hidden from view from the public, brought to light by people doing the right thing. But the secrecy was pervasive throughout the administration; regular employees were banned from talking with reporters, a record number of FOIA requests were denied and at least 1 in 3 were denied improperly (which was only ever found out if challenged), and, of course, the government had a secret extrajudicial kill list.

Drone Strikes

Conor Friedersdorf writes that in Obama’s first year in office, his administration conducted over 100 drone strikes…in Pakistan. Quick recap: Congress voted for an Authorization of the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 Attacks, which allowed the government to invade Afghanistan. Congress also voted to go into Iraq. Pakistan is not one of these countries, yet apparently Obama was carrying out an entire proxy war via drone strikes. In 2010, those strikes only intensified, yet it was worse than that; to cloud the truth, the Obama administration counted all military age males in the vicinity of these strikes as combatants, regardless if they were civilians or not. There were eventually reforms to this process, and the number of civilian casualties per strikes started to go down, but this is but the smallest of victories. In waging these undeclared wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, the Obama administration concocted an absurd “legal” process to target specific individuals without a trial, including American citizens. We are talking about a logistically planned and funded protocol for murdering American citizens overseen only by the President. This process eventually ended up killing a civilian by accident, a 16 year old American. This is unjustifiable. No one was ever held accountable for these lawless actions, and the president retains power to murder at will, which he has promptly done, murdering the deceased teenager’s sister this past week. Someone get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.

Executive Power

This section condenses much of what Gene Healy says in his excellent piece “Goodbye, Obama”. The powers the Obama administration seized and expanded are vast. While initially running against “dumb wars” and unauthorized wars, Obama became the first president to be at war for every day of his presidency. He undertook drone strikes in countries where he had authorization to be in, he even undertook an entire military action in Libya when Congress had expressly voted against supporting it. He continued to use the 2001 AUMF six years after the death of Osama bin Laden and against a group (the Islamic State) that essentially didn’t exist on 9/11. And the Trump administration has continued this justification. His drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians, and even American citizens. He has created a secret kill list with no oversight from courts or Congress. He has ascended to new heights of secrecy and prosecution of whistleblowers, and he has thwarted attempts at transparency at every turn. Without public knowledge, the ultimate oversight of the democratic process is destroyed as well. And none of this is even touching areas outside national security where Obama also took unilateral presidential orders to new and creative areas. These include instituting new immigration law by executive order when it was bogged down in Congress, creating new overtime labor rules, adding new environmental regulations on power plants, national school curriculum requirements, and even unilaterally amending Obamacare. Healy writes “More than any recent president, Obama has embraced and, to some extent, legitimized the anti-constitutional theory that congressional inaction is a legitimate source of presidential power.”

Obama’s legacy is the Imperial Presidency. Simply by occupying the same office as Obama, Donald Trump inherits vast powers, legislative, military, and judicial. Americans’ private information is available, their lives at risk without the need for due process, the very laws of the country can be changed via the presidential pen. Barack Obama has accomplished much during his presidency, but most of his important projects have ended in utter disaster, and the manner of their attempted accomplishment has greatly imperiled the separation of powers and constitutional restraint. While itg is quite possible, even likely, that the Trump presidency will be worse still, we cannot forget the incredible cost and horrific events of the Obama legacy.

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The Election Doesn’t Change Trump’s Bad Policies

The Trump Issues

In the Trump election aftermath, many on the left have discussed how best to approach this new challenge. Many have talked about trying to understand the concerns of Trump voters. This is a worthwhile undertaking. The people who voted for Trump have several worries spanning cultural differences, economic hardship, and perhaps even existential fear for the country as a whole. First, let’s go over those concerns.

The first, and perhaps most important concern for Trump voters was that the alternative was Hillary Clinton. This blog had an extensive discussion on Hillary’s shortcoming including her flaunting of the law, her foreign policy, her defense of Obamacare, her tax increases, and her slant towards government power in every sphere. I would argue some of these flaws are also present in Trump, but many Trump voters could at least hope the Trump unknown would deliver something more to their liking than the known failure of a Hillary presidency.

Granting all of Hillary’s problems, why did they think a Trump unknown was worth risking? Broadly, one area we did know where Trump stood was on the culture wars, and for that he was initially hailed as a hero against the left. I think the left has to shoulder a huge part of the blame here, because people have been trying to tell progressives their culture is intolerant for years.  See: Scott Alexander on tribalism and tolerance in 2014, Clarkhat on Gamergate in 2014, this blog last year, another blog, and Robby Soave did a good job summing it up after the election. I don’t think there’s much to add here.

On economic hardship, the more stereotypical Trump supporters (Trump won older voters, rural voters, and uneducated voters) have something to complain about as well. If you want to be depressed, please read this ridiculously long piece called “Unnecessariat “ (or skim this American Conservative piece for some key points). The takeaway is that Trumpland is hurting because it has been economically abandoned, not just culturally isolated. With services dominating the economy, the prospects for those living outside of cities has diminished as well. We are seeing increased suicides, drug addiction, and hopelessness in these areas.

Finally, combine these worries with media that feeds panic about disasters and internet echo chambers, and you get stark existential panic about entirely separate threats.

Cracked had an interesting piece on Trumpism and how we got here, and what caught my eye was the idea of urban culture slowly making its way out to the country. Cracked claims that older, less educated, rural folks saw the abandonment of Christian traditional culture in these hedonistic wonderlands of coastal “liberal” cities and thought there would be dire consequences for the nation. Low and behold, they see: “Chaos…Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees.”

The Trump Solutions

The problem is that many of these perceptions are just wrong. We are healthier, less likely to be murdered, and safer than ever before. Maybe we blame clickbait media, maybe we blame gullible people for believing it, but living in cities just isn’t that scary.

Last year, I met an acquaintance who had grown up in a smaller town in the South, but was now moving to another state near a major urban center. He found out I had grown up in his destination city, and despite having just met 5 minutes prior, he peppered me with bizarre questions about whether I thought it was safe to live there. I assured him that it was a major metropolitan area where millions live and work without a problem every day. He made it seem like he was moving to Afghanistan. Look, I’m sure it was pretty hairy to live in New York/Miami/Chicago/LA in the 80s, but crime rates have collapsed over the last 25 years. The amount of people murdered in the first season of Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen likely exceeds the total number of murders in all of Manhattan last year. Our perspective is all off. And if we are imagining that law and order is collapsing, our solution is going to vastly over-correct.

That’s part of a bigger point I’ve already made: Trump’s political victory doesn’t mean his supporters have any good ideas about improving the country, or even their own situations. It just means enough people thought there were enough problems for more voters to cast a ballot for Trump over Hillary in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. For instance, I think there is a real basis for complaining about the intolerant left-wing culture that has grown more bold over the last 10 years. But the Trump response has been his own version of intolerance, just copying the left and doing nothing to improve the situation.

On the economy, Trump’s plan is at best a mixed bag. Experts are mediocre at predicting economic growth, so figuring out the best economic policies to help growth may also be difficult. Trump and his supporters might blame globalism for their woes, but putting tariffs on imports and striving to shut down commerce with some of our largest trade partners will hit the poor the hardest. Price increases on low cost imported products will harm low income earners much more than upper middle class households with savings and easier means of substitution. Maybe in the long run this will spur some industrial investment, but I think it’s just as likely to speed up automation. In 4 years, many economic problems scaring Trump voters could easily be exacerbated.

More to the point, the government can’t reverse the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States. Short of seizing control of the economy via a 5 year plan, the world has changed. Manufacturing jobs peaked in the early 80s (BLS), and while globalization has accelerated the trend, it didn’t start it. Of course, “globalization” isn’t really an entity either; decisions that changed where firms do business were made by millions of individuals looking at cost-benefit analyses and comparing prices. The government didn’t say “move these factories to Mexico”, the government said “Technology is making it easier to communicate and do business in other countries, so we will reduce taxes and import quotas to make it easier for businesses and shareholders to do things they already want to do”. Trump can’t come back and order companies to make bad business decisions unless he wants a Soviet-style command economy with capital controls.

The United States has such a strong economy due to many factors, including its large, diverse, and skilled working populace, an abundance of natural resources, heavy investment in research and capital, and strong and interconnected financial markets. Our consumer market is the largest in the world, our trade dominates the globe in both goods and services. International economic institutions from the New York Stock Exchange to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are based in (and often dominated by) the United States.

Trump’s push to cut us off from strong trade ties will certainly harm the American centrality to the global economic system. Obviously, to many Trump fans, this is a bonus, not a problem. But long term decline in American trade would likely be connected to more sluggish growth as native industries are protected from competition; for example, Apple has pushed innovation in the smartphone market since 2007 which radically changed the status quo of what phones could do. It has had ripple effects throughout the economy as the spread of widely accessible powerful mobile computers has changed everything from transportation to social interaction to navigation and even shopping. But we should remember that the smartphone revolution was made possible by cheap global supply chains, and without them, we are likely to see stagnation.

And those older, rural, lesser educated Trump voters? No one is going to want to hire them unless the economy is clicking and demanding more workers. Sluggish growth with no competition bred by protectionist policies won’t help them.

Maybe Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation pushes will jumpstart the economy enough to overcome his bad trade polices. It’s possible, but I’m not betting on it. If it doesn’t work, in four years we will simply have the same economic problems just with tons more debt. That’s a big risk he’s taking. And it’s made more risky by Trump’s plan to expand the police state and start deporting at least two million people  (not to mention increasing military spending from the $500 billion a year we spend already).  The ACLU has gone into detail about the difficulties we face if Trump attempts to carry out his campaign promises. It’s very difficult to deport millions of people without doing away with probable cause; how do you find and arrest only the people here illegally? If they aren’t caught by the police while engaged in crime, then by necessity the police must come to them, requiring sweeps of entire residential areas, stopping people with no probable cause at all. At the very least this is grossly expensive, and more likely it will harass and catch thousands of innocent American citizens in a dragnet. And none of this even touches on registration of Muslims, continued mass surveillance, and use of torture.

In four years if the economy hasn’t improved much, debt has accumulated, and the police state has been vastly expanded, will Trump admit his policies haven’t worked? This seems unlikely as Trump has never really apologized for any stances he’s taken or mistakes he’s made. It seems far more likely that he’ll use this built up police state to harass his political enemies.

If Trump is willing to place trade barriers and dramatically reduce the world-leading $2.4 trillion worth of goods imported, how much will he be willing to use government subsidies to pay companies to “invest” in the United States? Does this sound like government direction of the economy? If things aren’t going well, will he seize more control of the economy?

I should note, I haven’t even brought up Trump’s extensive conflicts of interest, where representing American diplomatic interests may run counter to his profit-seeking ones. I also haven’t mentioned that someone who is extremely thin-skinned will be in charge of the nuclear launch codes. Many of the concerns of Trump voters don’t make much sense, many of the policy solutions of Trump and his voters are bad and would make things worse, and on top of that, Trump is irresponsible, incompetent, authoritarian, and many other things I’ve argued before. Continued opposition to Trump’s policies is vital over the next four years.

Comment on the official reddit thread.

Links 2016-03-24

Scott Alexander has a new post on happiness and economic growth. There must be a name for this paradox, because it’s blindingly obvious if you think about it: Right now, compare your life to the life of 100 years ago, given your current standing in society. Your life right now is way better, you have time to spend on internet learning and debating about ideas in ways you couldn’t dream of 100 years ago. You have better food choices, longer life expectancy, better pop culture, more stimulating interests, far easier communication with distant relatives, and so on. And yet, the exact same thing will be said about our lives compared to the lives of those who live 100 years in the future. Sure, those lives will be better, but I don’t know how much that bothers us today unless we really think about it. Most people are pretty excited to live today at the frontier of human knowledge, and we don’t see it as a loss that we don’t have cheap self-driving cars and instant delivery groceries for low cost.

But yet, when you do think about it, we hate sitting in traffic or having to go to the store to pick something up, and we wish we had technologies that could get rid of those inconveniences. Yet, I bet people in the future will just have other errands they hate doing just like we hate sitting in traffic. But they will be inconveniences for future people who are tolerating them so that they can do even more awesome things that we can’t imagine, just like people 100 years didn’t sit in traffic because they didn’t own cars at all.

It’s very confusing. On a personal scale, obviously it would be ridiculous to complain about your current standing, because future technologies haven’t been invented yet. So of course everyone is pretty satisfied with what technology level they live in. Yet, our lives are obviously better for having these technologies. How do we reconcile this?

In the last month, I’ve often thought that the closest president we’ve had to Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson; Trump is a loud-mouthed, populist who falls outside of the mainstream party system, yet has significant support from non-elites and were despised by the elites themselves.  This is also the perfect description for Andrew Jackson, who was so successful in this movement, he founded the Democratic Party. David Friedman comes to the same conclusion via a different route.

That last link caused me to run into a real problem with Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson grammatically. One subject is dead and one is alive, so what is the proper verb tense to use? Stack Exchange suggested this, which is honestly kind of lame.

Scott Sumner discusses socialism and France. He makes a short argument that France sounds like a pretty good model country for modern socialism: high amount of skilled civil servants, broad support for socialist policies, a willing government to implement them, and a modern, developed economy.  Yet, Bernie Sanders supporters often reach for the Nordic countries rather than France as the big-welfare state (“socialist”) ideal.  Why is French socialist policy somewhat of a political flop, while Nordic countries are idealized? And would a Bernie-America look like Denmark or maybe better, or perhaps more like France, or even worse? Given the size and diversity of America’s population and economy, France seems closer than Denmark, although both are closer to each other than the US. The only socialistic countries of comparable size seem to be the China and the Soviet Union which have forms of socialism even Bernie Sanders would abhor. Mostly.

Do you have no friends? Never fear, it’s because really, really smart people are better off with few friends.

Bryan Caplan’s model of the Right and Left, and how it’s oddly doing well this election cycle.

Overcoming Bias discusses the cost and benefits of voting. How much would you pay to have your vote count more? His conclusion is that we don’t vote to change the outcome of the election.

Surprise! NSA data will soon be used for routine policing! Coverage from the New York Times, and the Massachusetts ACLU as well.

Bryan Caplan also has a good discussion of libertarian critiques of welfare.  Matt Zwolinski has a good counter post. I like the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism, or market liberalism or whatever, so I think Caplan’s critiques are pointed at exactly what I believe, which is excellent! You always want to have your beliefs critiqued by smart people. I think Caplan is right on many of his points, but I feel like my views are more politically practical. Voters obviously want some form of welfare for the poor, and at least that part could be done more efficiently with my ideas.

This is a good write up on the decentralized crypto-currency-ish entity Ethereum; Reason also did a recent video on it.   Very soon I’ll be able to explain to people what it actually does. Right after I’ve figured out how to install it.  If you want to learn about it without me, here is Ethereum’s website.

Fact checking Trump on trade. Why do we talk about trade deficits? I have no idea why they matter.  Is it a problem if I buy a phone from Apple and I live in New York instead of California? Is there now a trade deficit between New York and California since I sent money out of my local community? No, nobody cares. And for the US, it’s even less relevant, since those dollars that US citizens spent have to come back to the US to be redeemed for goods and services. It would be like if I paid for my iPhone in New York dollars that had to come back to New York. I’m a free trade proponent, but I’m not deaf to some concerns people might have about trade, but this is one of the worst anti-free trade arguments you could make.