Why is Trump's anti-ally protectionism so popular?

Great Debates
41

In my honest experience, ignorance of matters related to economics is true of all people, on all parts of the political spectrum.

When Canada was originally looking to sign the first Free Trade Agreement with the USA, it was the Progressive Conservative Party that got it done. The opposition was on the left side of the spectrum, and most opposition to free trade is still a leftist position, for all the same reasons of ignorance. Hell, it was that way in the USA until pretty recently, and the left was wildly against TPP because - something.

Yes, Trumpists do accept things Trump says on faith, on any subject, but that’s different from ignorance.

I agreed it’s all very frustrating, I was just saying that it’s ignorance, not stupidity. People don’t understand this stuff, but they CAN.

42

Not to digress on the digression, but not all trade agreements are created equal. One of the issues with the TPP was the lack of transparency about the specific terms, such as the concern at one point that draconian industry-friendly and consumer-hostile US intellectual property laws would be imposed on all signatories. Whether this was a valid concern or not, there’s a point to be made about all trade agreements that the devil is in the details, and the thing about Trump’s blather that his base eats up with such delight is that it not only ignores the facts, like most of his pronouncements, but really has virtually no relationship to reality at all.

43

The “allies” are allies of the US government. The people don’t care about the allies too much, especially when the policies, like tariffs, have domestic implications. The attention paid to allies after 9/11 was an aberration.

44

Republicans have never been free-traders. This is a common myth on both sides because Reagan said free-market stuff. He was an avid protectionist as was GWB.

45

I’ll just clarify for non-Canadians that the Progressive Conservative party was the mainstream right-wing party in Canada at the time. I know that many people can be confused by the “Progressive” bit in the name, given that in contemporary political discourse that refers to the left-wing.

46

The kind of ignorance you’re talking about is imprecision - you don’t know the details but the broad strokes you do know yield close enough results to work. The kind of ignorance that people have regarding economics is inaccuracy - they put together the handful of puzzle pieces they have and get the entirely wrong picture.

It doesn’t help that people are actively lying to them - and they lack the knowledge to detect the lies. It’s sort of as if somebody told you that sugar could be replaced with salt, and then when your resulting cookies were garbage they told you the liberals did it. The vaccination business suffers from this sort of problem too.

47

Your knowledge of history seems to be about as defective as Trump’s.
Reagan radio speech on free trade, November, 1988:
Over the past 200 years, not only has the argument against tariffs and trade barriers won nearly universal agreement among economists but it has also proven itself in the real world, where we have seen free-trading nations prosper while protectionist countries fall behind.

America’s most recent experiment with protectionism was a disaster for the working men and women of this country. When Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, we were told that it would protect America from foreign competition and save jobs in this country—the same line we hear today. The actual result was the Great Depression, the worst economic catastrophe in our history; one out of four Americans were thrown out of work. Two years later, when I cast my first ballot for President, I voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who opposed protectionism and called for the repeal of that disastrous tariff.

Ever since that time, the American people have stayed true to our heritage by rejecting the siren song of protectionism.
…
Part of the difficulty in accepting the good news about trade is in our words. We too often talk about trade while using the vocabulary of war. In war, for one side to win, the other must lose. But commerce is not warfare. Trade is an economic alliance that benefits both countries. There are no losers, only winners. And trade helps strengthen the free world.

Yet today protectionism is being used by some American politicians as a cheap form of nationalism, a fig leaf for those unwilling to maintain America’s military strength and who lack the resolve to stand up to real enemies—countries that would use violence against us or our allies. Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies; they are our allies. We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends—weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world—all while cynically waving the American flag. The expansion of the international economy is not a foreign invasion; it is an American triumph, one we worked hard to achieve, and something central to our vision of a peaceful and prosperous world of freedom.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=35207

On signing the Canada-US free trade agreement, October, 1987:
The people of the United States and Canada have had a long and harmonious friendship that is the envy of the world. Now, in addition to sharing the world’s longest undefended border, we will share membership in the world’s largest free trade area. This agreement will provide enormous benefits for the United States. It will remove all Canadian tariffs, secure improved access to Canada’s market for our manufacturing, agriculture, high technology and financial sectors, and improve our security through additional access to Canadian energy supplies. We have also gained important investment opportunities in Canada and resolved many vexing trade issues.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=33502

48

How profoundly puzzling it is, then, that Ronald Reagan was the President who championed and signed the Free Trade Agreement with Canada.

I am further baffled by your claim GWB was an “avid protecctionist,” given his complete lack of effort to get rid of NAFTA and signed free trade agreements with a dozen additional countries. International trade vastly increased under his presidency.

49

Yes thank you for substantiating my claim that Reagan said free market stuff.

I see that people have googled “Reagan free trade” and come back with the same solitary example. Even Reagan’s advisors understood that Reagan was a true Republican protectionist:

A Republican courting industrial interests through protectionism? Yeah pretty much the foundation of the party.

50

NAFTA is not free trade, it is managed trade.

You forgot Bush’s disastrous steel tariffs and textile protectionism. Of course international trade increased under his presidency that’s not an extraordinary claim. China had recently joined the WTO. Big whoop. The point is he was a protectionist, along with Reagan, Nixon, Robert Taft, Hoover, and Lincoln.

51

GWB also put duties on Canadian lumber.

52

A lot of people don’t really understand things like global economics and foreign relations. So Trump is able to present this as an issue of “us vs them” and a lot of people will just back “our” side without knowing who’s right or wrong. As a bonus for Trump, people tend to rally behind their national leader in times of conflict - even if the conflict is manufactured by that leader.

53

There was also the 2003 ban on Canadian beef.

54

You’re welcome, but that isn’t “free market stuff”, it’s “free trade stuff”, and if you read the actual words Reagan’s ideological position on free trade could not possibly be more unequivocal, the words any clearer, or the argument any stronger. To claim that Reagan was against free trade when the man so clearly said the exact opposite is nothing short of Orwellian revisionism. And I didn’t find this through random Googling, I was out shopping and listening to the car radio, and Reagan’s 1978 and 1988 speeches were part of a documentary highlighting the stark differences from the situation that Trump’s belligerence has created today. So if Reagan’s words weren’t representative of his overall policies and beliefs, the documentary makers were fooled, too.

55

Yes, they clearly were. Reagan was excellent rhetorically. In practice, he was as bad as the worst boogeyman a free-marketeer could conjure. Protectionism ruled according to his own advisors. You may as well be quoting from an Ayn Rand novel. His words were pure fiction from a trained actor’s mouth.

56

Regardless of its popularity in America, these tariffs and Trump tough talk against Trudeau have brought Canadians from all sides together in a way I don’t recall seeing in my lifetime.

Weeks/months ago some NAFTA changes not entirely in Canada’s favour would likely have been politically manageable. But not it is hard to see how it would be politically advantageous to give into any of Trumps demands.

As this article writes “To the walls with our overpriced cheese. And make the Americans pay for it!”

57

Talk about biting your nose to spite your face. It’s sad when the people identify with the politicians only to get worked over.

58

Two differences:

GWB was using that as a political gambit in a political swing before an upcoming election and everyone saw right through it. He never wanted a fight; he just wanted to convince people he could fight.

But the more important distinction between Trump and his earlier predecessors is that his predecessors recognized and respected the international framework to both do trade and resolve differences. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Trump does not.

Sure, countries still take steps to protect pet industries (we’ve played that game, too). But the frameworks have generally encouraged and liberalized trade between countries, and more importantly, they’ve created an institutional framework to resolve disputes, which promotes global confidence that minor tiffs won’t turn into full-blown conflict. Trump is not just imposing small tariffs and threatening bigger ones; he’s threatening to undo frameworks and he’s threatening confidence in global trade. He’s destabilizing the entire system of trade, of which the United States is a part.

An even greater distinction is that neither Ronald Reagan nor George W Bush were puppets of a foreign adversary.

59

There’s an old joke that goes : two politicians are debating, one says “You’re lying about this !” and the other replies “Yes, I know, but hear me out !”
Who the fuck cares about what Reagan *said *? What he and his administration **did **is what matters.

60

This statement betrays both a misunderstanding of what “free trade” is and what “managed trade” could mean. If you aren’t going to seriously discuss the issue, find some other thread. If you want to continue posting, I believe there’s a board rule that you must post in English.