Some time ago, in one of my many railings against our president-elect, I noted that, once upon a time, even echt-dirty fingernail Republican Sarah Palin was a die-hard free-trader. Well, it looks like Sarah’s fingernails are still dirty, and her heart, and her free-trade principles, still true, for she’s risen up in rightuous wrath against Donald Trump’s Carrier deal. Writes Sarah (just a bit fulsomely)
“Foundational to our exceptional nation’s sacred private property rights, a business must have freedom to locate where it wishes. In a free market, if a business makes a mistake (including a marketing mistake that perhaps Carrier executives made), threatening to move elsewhere claiming efficiency’s sake, then the market’s invisible hand punishes. Thankfully, that same hand rewards, based on good business decisions.”
I don’t know if it’s a great idea to start of a sentence with the word “foundational” (I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it done before), and I don’t think that property rights are “sacred”, but otherwise, Sarah’s got it exactly right. Subsidies suck, and tariffs are terrible. Our (largely) free Obama economy just created 178,000 jobs last month, while Trump takes a victory lap (or 10), for cutting the number of Carrier jobs going south from 2,000 to 1,000, at a cost of around $7,000 a job.1 But, hey, it’s exciting! And that’s what Trump fans voted for!
Afterwords
Hat tip to Politico’s Madeline Conway for catching this.
The push-back against the Carrier deal has been gratifyingly bi-partisan, including Sarah, the Wall Street Journal2, and Larry Summers, who sees, I fear correctly, a great deal of darkness in Trump’s actions—darkness now, and darkness down the road. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken it to Donald’s terrible deal as well, throwing some effective punches from the populist perspective, even though their “solutions” are almost as lame as Trump’s.
I’ve rather neglected Dave in this post, but if you want to learn from the father of comparative advantage (and why wouldn’t you?), check out his classic On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
