Based Economics

      As is well-known at this point, Donald Trump is once again going to be the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024. Having shown an opposition to free trade to be the single principle he has always shown unrelenting dedication to, he famously started a trade war with China in his first term to show his determination in this matter, among much other shenanigans. Despite all the negative economic consequences of these actions and the lack of any economists supporting his mercantilist views, he plans to double down on the tactics should he return to the White House in 2025. He has said that, along with a 10% tariff on all imports, he will impose an astronomical 60% tariff on all imports from China. That country that has famously became such a manufacturing giant that it has been dubbed “The World’s Factory”. Americans overwhelmingly buy goods that have “Made in China” printed on them due to their lower prices than alternatives. Now imagine that all the goods that Americans ...

 We all remember the very bizarre moment back in 2019 where Trump was speaking at that year’s CPAC and he was attempting to explain the Great Tariff Debate of 1888 and how his tariffs could, like those of the Republican Party’s back then, bring in so much revenue that the government would not know what to do with it. Needless to say, the much smaller federal budget as a percentage of America’s GDP, the much smaller debt to GDP ratio of America in 1888, nor even the fact that there was no income tax back then, did not enter the equation during this APUSH moment on the 45th’s part. That being said, 1888 is not a completely irrelevant year for Trump, as it was basically Grover Cleveland’s equivalent to the 2020 election. He lost to Benjamin Harrison that year, despite ironically losing the popular vote as a Democrat, but came back four years in 1892. He won that election and became the first President to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was thus the 22nd and 24th President in the s...

            One of the big international news stories of August 2023 was that a country usually seen as not particularly noteworthy on the global stage, Argentina, might be the first in the world to have a self-described libertarian President in the form of Javier Milei. He received a slight plurality of over 30% of the vote in a presidential primary that plays a key indicator of who is likely to win the election in October. Beyond just simple surprise at the fact that a libertarian who was not Ron Paul was getting attention, as well as the natural journalistic temptation to make a dubious comparison between Milei and Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, many were even more shocked by the results because of the long history of heavy government intervention in the Argentine economy and the rapid change in policy that the winning candidate was proposing, particularly in regards to trade. Really since the start of the Great Depression, but particularly since the...

 https://www-cnnbrasil-com-br.translate.goog/politica/na-abertura-do-foro-de-sao-paulo-lula-diz-que-ser-chamado-de-comunista-e-motivo-de-orgulho/?_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc On June 29, CNN Brasil released a video of a recent public appearance by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the opening of the 26 th Meeting of the Forum of São   Paulo, wherein he most memorably stated that he would be “proud” to be called a “communist” and that he would be offended to be called a “Nazi, neo-fascist, or terrorist”. Putting aside the obvious fact that being accused of any of those four terms would be cause for serious offense and no pride should be held for any in the slightest, due to the drastic harm to humanity they all have done to humanity, it is the “neo-fascist” slur that deserves the most attention in the case of Brazil. Sadly, the world’s seventh largest economy does indeed have a lot of resemblance to the fascist economies of o...

 Confirming the 2017 interpretations of economists Edward Glaeser, Rafael Di Tella, and Lucas LLac, none of whom are radical free market ideologues, and the latter two of whom are Argentines themselves, in their paper, Introduction to Argentine exceptionalism , there is a sort of historical revisionism among some students of Argentinian economic history regarding how prosperous the country really was and seemingly how much potential it really had. The go-to theory for subscribers of this approach is the idea that, despite being in the top 10 countries in the world as concerned GDP per capita rankings by 1913, Argentina was never actually that rich and it was because of the legacy of Spanish colonial land policy that this was still the case and the growth that did occur was because of an export boom. This is more or less the theory posited by left-wing YouTuber BadEmpanada in his 2021 YouTube video “Argentina Was Never ‘Rich’: The Myth of Economic Decline”. The basic premise of this...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZMxM7DdQUM In a recent video by the generally decent, economically liberal YouTube channel, Stephen Michael Davis, Davis reports that one of his previous videos was flagged for a copyright claim because it quoted from Bernie Sanders’ 2023 book It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. Davis unfortunately defended this decision by YouTube on the grounds that if he just posted the whole book or even portions of it, that that would ostensibly be “theft and a violation of property rights” and Penguin Random House would be perfectly within their rights to have the video taken down. The problem with this is that property rights and theft imply that scarcity of a given object exists and that scarcity has to be allocated in a just way. With words on paper, there is no scarcity and therefore no property rights and subsequently, there was no theft. Whether in the form of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or anything else, intellectual property i...

We often hear about how the Articles of Confederation were too weak for a sufficient national government for the newly created United States of America for a multitude of reasons, from being unable to collect taxes as needed to being unable to stop the states from adopting their own trade policies, and perhaps most famously, to prevent events like Shays’ Rebellion that Massachusetts managed to put down on its own from re-occurring. It is because of this, we are taught in American history, that the 1787 Constitutional Convention convened and the U.S. Constitution was adopted. What often goes unexplained in this simplistic narrative is if the Congress of the Confederation were so weak, how did they manage to pass sweeping legislation that effectively nationalized the large swath of land that Virginia had claimed after the British cession of said territory with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, as with the Land Ordinance of 1784, or create an entirely new government, as with the Northwest Ordinan...

  Johan Norberg is perhaps the classical liberal historian most famous for rebutting the fallacious claims about the supposed socialism of the Scandinavian countries around 2015 when such rumors were being spread by Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and before that, as the economist who best broke down why Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine was a very flawed book, built much more on ideology than sound history or political economy. It was, however, with his 2001 book In Defense of Global Capitalism , that he really cut his teeth and it is because of that book that he seems to be much more qualified than most Reason or Cato Institute scholars to talk about issues in a way that can only be described as less ideological. The example of this? The issue of land reform and how it could have stopped economic populist madmen, like Juan Peron in Argentina or Getulio Vargas in Brazil, from rising to power. This must have been especially brazen given the climate that this was happening rig...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5luQB_yFmTM https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2021/mar/31/uk-housing-crisis-how-did-owning-a-home-become-unaffordable https://www.adamsmith.org/capitalismcansolvethehousingcrisis              YouTube’s favorite far-left Tankie, known for such previous outrages as denying the deliberately anti-Ukrainian intentions of the Holodomor famine, has recently attempted to clean up his image and has subsequently deleted much of his past content. This was doubtless to make his AtlasVPN sponsor happier, as even they must have their limits on what they can have associated with their brand name. Seeing one of the people they’re sponsoring have a video titled “Why All Landlords Are Parasites” with a picture of Mao Zedong in the thumbnail must have understandably set off some alarms at their headquarters. We can infer this and not a change of ideology to be the case because in his recent “What is Neo-liberalism?”...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu22RNjjrG0 In December 2022, a YouTube channel with over 1.3 million subscribers, known as CaspianReport, uploaded a video titled "Why Argentina is not rich". The thumbnail of the video fittingly shows Juan Peron in front of the Argentine flag. This seemed no doubt understandable. The legacy of Peron's spendthrift populism has definitely not left Argentina after all these decades, as shown by the multiple Presidents and legislative politicians who have called themselves "Peronists" over the years, including current President Alberto Fernandez. Seeing that, one expected that maybe the video was going to go over the very dumb things that happened under his presidency/dictatorship. These would include, but not be limited to: restriction of international trade, wage-and-price controls, seizure of private property, nationalization of multiple industries, and creating a Nordic-style social democracy that was largely financed by money...

                 May 15, 2023 is remembered by Palestinians the world over as the 75 th anniversary of the Nakba. Meaning “The Catastrophe” in Arabic, this day is in remembrance of the events that constituted the ethnic expulsion and/or the causing to flee of around 700,000 Palestinians from what is today the State of Israel, the destruction of around 400 to 600 villages and erasure of evidence of their existence, and even acts of biological warfare by means of poisoning wells to prevent people from being able to return. As shown by the horrors of deliberately targeting a non-threatening village in Deir Yassin, the Zionist militias of the Irgun and Lehi were more than willing to engage in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. The main Zionist militia, which would later become the IDF, the Haganah, may not have been such as extreme, but their complicity in Palestinians being driven out to make room for Jewish settlers is ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNxXRigHri4 The Juice Media is an Australian company that mainly operates on YouTube, wherein they promote left-wing politics, both in their home country and abroad, through their internationally-seen “Honest Government Ads”. These ads are meant to seem like what the creators imagine brutally honest, vulgar equivalents of government public service announcements would sound like. They sometimes offer decent historical and contemporary interpretations of conflicts in obscure places in the world, such as the brutality that has been and is happening in West Papua at the hands of Indonesia’s imperializing government, but most of the time, they stick to economic analysis and subsequently push left-wing economics and advocate voting against perceived right-wingers, including the Australian Labor Party, in favor of whatever the most progressive alternative is. The Australian Green Party, their home country’s case. Coming across as basically the social demo...

      https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/01/Ehrenreich-FINAL.pdf       One of the few times a Fall 2016 Lindenwood University student would have encounter left-wing propaganda at that otherwise fairly calm and apolitical business-oriented college was in a student’s general education freshman English classes. There, a student would have the deep misfortune of reading an article written by an active Democratic Socialists of America member, Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich titled: “Time to Wake Up: Stop Blaming Poverty on the Poor”. While it definitely does display a left-wing bias, such as by overstating the War on Poverty’s success, as well as the mild retreat from it in the 90s, the article does seem to be a good expose on what poverty in America is like and what women and minorities in particular often go through. A infamously memorable line from that article is where the plot was lost, however. It read: “This would have been the moment...