Milton Friedman

I was working on a Phd in Theoretical Nuclear Physics when Conservative economist Milton Friedman came for a teach-in on campus.  I’d read some of his articles and was a fan.  And taking advantage of all the scholarship while you have the opportunity to be in college is an opportunity you shouldn’t miss, right?  So I attended Friedman’s class.  I will never forget how he began his lecture. “If you lined up all the economists in the world end-to-end,” he said, “they wouldn’t reach a single conclusion.” Then after the laughter subsided, “But there is one thing almost every economist agrees on—free trade.  For when trade is restricted less commerce occurs and we are all poorer. Only dictators and politicians and unions don’t like free trade.”  Are you listening Donald Trump?

Conservative means free markets and free trade and less regulation.  Trump wants trade wars and never mentions what he’d do to reduce regulation.  Yet the doubling of the regulatory code during Obama is one of the main reasons business isn’t expanding much, jobs are scarce.  Hillary is in the same corner.  Support for NAFTA and TPP has about collapsed in the Democrat party.  The rank and file want to blame all their problems on “ferreners” and Wall Street guys.  Nice try, but do you know what would happen if we didn’t have public companies or international trade? 

Worse is the effect of a trade war.  The Great Depression became a great depression when an ordinary recession was not allowed to naturally re-expand due to the Hawley-Smoot Tariff which increased tax on average import from 17% to 62%.  The ‘ferreners’ retaliated and international commerce with USA dried up.  Hence Europe-- Nazi Germany and England and others—had a recession in 1931-1934 but recovered smartly while USA languished amid repeated bank failures.  Elect a Dem or a Trump and see what you get.

I found an answer to who is voting for Trump.  A college in Ohio ran some added exit poll questions.  Most telling was, “So you voted the Republican ballot.  But what do you regularly call yourself—Republican, Democrat or Independent.”  Answer was 64%R, 28%I, 8%D.  That fits with my crude calculations of 10% Dems crossing the line.  So it means that 36% Dems and Indies are selecting the Republican nominee.  Is that equivalent to shipping in 36% Social Democrats from Germany to choose the nominee? Are those guys going to then volunteer to work to elect down-ballot Republicans? I’d be stunned if they ever showed up.  There is a reason why parties have certain basic philosophies and structures you know.  If voters go into a booth and don’t know one sucker from another on the ballot, how do they vote?  They associate with parties and politics and the head candidate on the ballot.  Put a wild man like Trump on the top and watch the down-ballot candidates get trumped.

All of this is to say that the half-truth of the media about ‘the establishment’ is just so much melodrama.  Who says that Mitch McConnell can influence what Oklahoma voters choose?  Yet the media’s influence is maddening.  Once again it looks like a East Coast moderate/liberal is being forced upon a gullible public.  Will it matter if we get one who yells and has tantrumps and “has a tenuous relationship with the truth” or Monica’s boyfriend’s habitually lying wife.

I guess I’ll take truth, and Friedman free markets and free trade and true blue conservatism, not the fake kind.  Vote Cruz.