Interesting perspective.
Here's a
pretty reasoned analysis of Trump's trade approach, which is to say describing in detail all of the idiocy and missteps, from the National Review.
I'm sure you won't read it. It's too long and reasonable in its analysis. So here's a few money quotes:
On purposely devaluing your currency to compete with poor countries on labor:
"Being poor is the worst kind of competitive advantage to have, and only two kinds of people pursue that advantage as a matter of national policy. The first kind is tyrants, such as the ones in Beijing, who for years artificially lowered the standard of living of the Chinese people on the theory that the Communist bosses could play a long game in which economic development would happen on their terms and under their control, without much real economic power accruing outside of the state. Keeping people unnecessarily poor in order to consolidate the party’s political power and to maintain a firm nationalist whip hand over politically sensitive industries is a monstrous policy but one that has its admirers in managerial nationalists in the United States both left and right.
This policy also appeals to a second kind of people: idiots."
On Trump expanding his trade war to South America:
"What’s particularly idiotic and dishonest here is that none of this was necessary, and none of it has anything to do with monetary policy in Argentina or Brazil. U.S. farmers have lost market share to the South Americans not because of crafty decisions made in Buenos Aires or Brasilia but because of dumb ones made in Washington by the Trump administration, i.e., by the same cabal of backward, slavering incompetents who now are rolling out this new policy."
In sum:
"Now President Trump proposes to mitigate the effects of his incompetently executed trade war by expanding that incompetently executed trade war. He is trying to cure arsenic poisoning with cyanide.
Who is poorer? American farmers, for one, and others involved in agriculture. (It never seems to occur to anybody that most farmers’ biggest asset, their land, is worth less when its products are cut off from major overseas markets. And the bankers who have accepted that land as collateral have diminished assets, too, as do people invested in those banks, and so on and so forth, throughout the economy in subtle connective tendrils.) If the president is successful in devaluing the dollar, then Americans as a whole will be worse off, too: And if we should happen to devalue our currency to the extent that it falls as fast as the Argentine peso has? Argentina’s inflation rate was above 50 percent in October. Does that sound like the road to victory to you?
But at least we are sticking it to the Chinese, right? Don’t be too sure. Xi Jinping is doing fine, and China’s economy in the third quarter grew at three times the U.S. rate.
Funny kind of “winning” for the Trump administration."