In 1954, Ronald Reagan’s ex-wife Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, a closeted gay actor, appeared in a move based on a novel by Lloyd Douglas about a young man who decides to live his life as a tribute to a doctor whose death he accidentally causes, serving others without expecting anything in return. It’s ironic Donald Trump, a narcissistic psychopath, is obsessed with devoting his life to serving himself, and no one else. It was a bit of a soap opera, but it was based on the example of the life of Jesus, so good for them.
Donald Trump is obsessed with tariffs. The cause, as usual, is ignorance. In 1890 there was no income tax, so the main source of revenue for the federal government was tariffs. And the average tariff rate at that time was more than 40 percent. Trump talks about this period in history as a kind of golden era for the United States. But the conditions that existed then were different from today – so different that using ideas from the 1890s to craft policy today makes absolutely no sense.
In 1890, just about any industry, or even any company, could get a tariff wall put up to raise the price of manufactured goods – and eventually agricultural products – produced by foreign companies, so that American producers wouldn’t have to worry about having their prices undercut by foreign competitors whose workers earned a tiny fraction of typical American wages. Sometimes they enabled excess profits by allowing U.S. companies to charge much more than they needed to suppress competition. Adam Smith said that competition was the best thing about the “free market.” That’s how excess profits were eliminated. And with tariff barriers to kill the competition, American manufacturers aren’t forced to innovate, the fringe benefit of competition. But most of all, tariffs are a little unseemly: If you can’t get stronger, weaken your competitor.
Remember, this was the age of robber barons and the rise of the super-rich in our country. Businesses were just figuring out how to overcharge their customers, sometimes spectacularly. The writers known collectively as the “muckrakers” documented corporate greed and excess. Vertical monopolies in steel, in oil and gas, and in railroad transportation shocked Americans who had been told that our free market system would automatically produce the “best of all possible worlds.” It took about a decade for the masses in Russia to come to a different conclusion, and the world is still paying for “wretched excess.”
By 1930, foreign producers had gotten good at building just about everything that Americans produced. So the Smoot-Hawley tariff was passed in 1930 (no relation to Josh Hawley, the Missouri Senator who saluted the January 6 rioters with a raised fist) for the purpose of protecting American manufacturers from foreign competition during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, foreign countries countered with tariffs of their own, and sales of American products to foreign countries plummeted, and the result was that the Depression was made even worse.
How did Trump and his buddies not see this coming?
Trump is obsessed with tariffs. He thinks that they can be an unlimited source of cash to finance the tax cuts he plans to gift to his billionaire supporters and financiers. He's apparently oblivious to the fact that the biggest tariff in American history backfired – just as his tariffs are backfiring today. And I’m still hoping that Trump’s voters will realize that tax cuts for billionaires have to be paid for by the rest of us, including them. But I’m not holding my breath.
It’s ironic that Lloyd Douglas’s novel of the same name as today’s column is about a man whose dream is to serve others (as Jesus commanded) without any expectation of reward. No human being on this earth today is farther from that than Donald J. Trump, a narcissistic psychopath who desperately desires to be worshipped like Jesus, but who cares about no one but himself.
I also have a magnificent obsession: I desperately hope that Trump and the clown posse that he has selected for his cabinet will make so many bad decisions that the mid-terms will erase the Republicans’ majorities in both Houses. I hope that the Supreme Court will suppress the urge to be a rubber stamp for the Republican Party. And I hope that Trump will be shamed into retreating into the White House and ending his second Presidency as Ronald Reagan did, imprisoned in a confused mind. And like Reagan, Trump’s sycophants can spend the next few decades lying about what a great President he was, while the country is trying to recover from his mistakes and incompetence.
But today, after the recent panic caused by Trump’s erratic tariff policy announcements and its disastrous effect on many Americans’ 401(k) retirement portfolios, I just hope that the damage can be held to a minimum.
Many people predicted that Trump’s policies would do permanent damage to our country. I didn’t expect to start to see it within less than three months.
Les Pinter lives in Springville.
