In August, Congress passed and president Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion corporate welfare bill for US semiconductor manufacturers.

In October, the Biden administration added new restrictions on  semiconductor exports to China, banning not just sales of semiconductors, but of the tools to make them — including by and to companies located in neither the US nor China.

All of this activity is essentially an extension of Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s trade war with China, waged for the purpose of “protecting” Big Business from foreign competition at the expense of American consumers.

That’s not how its promoters put it, of course. Advocates of “industrial policy” say they just want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, reduce American dependence on imports, and of course guard our “national security” from an ever-growing list of Enemies of the Week.

But the two ways of putting it amount to the same thing.

Contrary to what you may have heard from advocates of “industrial policy,” the US manufactures more stuff now than it ever has (apart from the same worldwide dip during the COVID-19 pandemic) — more than half again as much by value than it did 25 years ago.

Yes, there are fewer manufacturing JOBS … but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The less labor required to manufacture a thing, the cheaper it is to make that thing and the more people can afford that thing. More efficient, less labor-intensive manufacturing leaves workers free to put their labor into areas where it offers a greater return — and with historically low unemployment levels, why shouldn’t they?

Instead of welding auto frames or making shoes, more Americans are providing healthcare, information technology services, and other things we need at least as much as cars and shoes.

As for dependence on imports, such dependence promotes peace and friendship between countries. People who need and value each other’s products and services don’t fight, they trade. The recent downturn in US-China military relations is not mere coincidence.

That’s not to say protectionism doesn’t have beneficiaries. It certainly does.

Protectionism’s beneficiaries are politically connected business interests who want to charge you $500 for a laptop computer and so ask the government to keep you from buying a competing Chinese model for $350. And, of course, the politicians who give those business cronies what they want.

American consumers don’t benefit. We pay. Every “new American job” created by protectionist policies costs means that every American consumer — including the workers in those  “new jobs” — pays more for the products or services involved.

Advocates of “industrial policy” want you to believe their ideas make you better off. Unless you’re a large stockholder in a  “protected” corporation, they’re lying to you.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Election Day” has become a fuzzy concept lately: Officially it falls on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November,” but most states offer early voting in person or by mail these days.

Millions of Americans have already cast their votes — and the probability that we won’t know all the winners and losers on “Election Night” is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100%. The US Senate race in Georgia may well go to a runoff. Some congressional races may come out close enough to justify a recount, and in some other races prospective sore losers have already announced their intention to litigate any result they don’t like until the cows come home.

Also, even though I’m writing this on the Saturday before “Election Day,” there’s a good chance you won’t see it until Wednesday or later. So now feels like as good a time as any for the “morning after” column.

So, how was it for you? Are you basking in the afterglow of “your team’s” victories, or venting loudly about the unfairness of “your team’s” losses?

Are you convinced that, after all the months of constant foofooraw leading up to “Election Day,” anything substantial really changed between Monday and Wednesday?

It didn’t. We’ve still got the same problems we had before, and we’ve still got the same people (minus a few old faces and plus a few new) who will spend the next two years promising to solve those problems if we’ll all just VOTE HARDER … next time.

The same people who’ve spent the last two years telling us that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVER said the same thing about the previous election and will say the same thing about the next election.

Those of us who believe that VOTING HARDER will solve our problems will find reasons why VOTING HARDER didn’t work this time.

Their team lost its Senate majority, or didn’t gain one.

The House changed majority parties, or didn’t.

The dog ate their ballots.

There was spit on that baseball or lead in that bat.

Whether we believe any of that or not, life will go on next week in much the same way it did last week.

Which, I guess, is better than the alternative.

I’ve worked full-time in politics for more than two decades and part-time for more than three.  I can summarize what I’ve learned in six words:

There’s nothing new under the sun.

The issues we tussle over may change in detail, but they don’t change in essence. VOTING HARDER answers the question “who do we let run our lives?” when we should instead be asking “why  let ANYONE run our lives?”

I follow (and occasionally practice) politics for the same reason a junkie seeks the next fix or a compulsive gambler places just one more bet, not because I expect VOTING HARDER to change my life for the better. It’s a nasty habit and I really should quit. But the dog ate my ballot.

What’s your excuse?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

After Halloween, it’s still a mad and Demon-Haunted World.

On November 1, Kathleen Parker invoked the universalist humanism of Carl Sagan’s 1995 book by that name on the op-ed page of the Washington Post (“Time to abandon Twitter, people”) in contrast to “today’s increasingly vile and violent partisanship.”  It’s not just the midterm elections that horrify Parker, but the stoking of divisiveness on social media, particularly on a Twitter now owned by Elon Musk.

Parker amends Sagan’s insistence that “if a human disagrees with you, let him live” to a suggestion that if Musk’s Twitter becomes overrun by reactionaries, we should  “let them live — among themselves.”

Musk’s “free speech absolutist” approach to Twitter may terrify Parker, but Sagan feared that free speech would be restricted to prevent “foreign authors” from “spouting alien ideologies” or atrophy “when no one contradicts the government.” If anything, Sagan was too sanguine that hot-button issues would be dealt with by “shav[ing] a little freedom off the Bill of Rights” rather than a lot.

Rather than calling for top-down oversight of the emerging information superhighway, Sagan welcomed “inexpensive computer self-publishing” as a means to avoid “a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions.”  Noting how quickly “the apparatus for generating indignation” had whipped up support for a war against Saddam Hussein, “someone almost no American had heard of” before 1990 (and of whom he was “not myself an admirer”), Sagan doubted that such expansive “power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands.”

The host and coauthor of Cosmos was updating the view of the host and coauthor of The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling wrote that Playboy magazine’s 1966 interview with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was “a public service of infinite value,” since “it is not public exposure that helps these perverters of human dignity” but the “apathy” resulting from its absence.

Writing for Futurism.com on September 26, Sam Sagan and Ann Druyan (who had coauthored the defense of free speech with her husband Carl in The Demon-Haunted World) reiterated that “we can no longer afford to stay in our silos, occasionally lobbing angry invectives at our antagonists. We can’t afford to stop communicating with each other.”

Calls for online communication to become even more siloed — and for a marketplace of ideas closer to the chartered monopolies of the East India Companies than open agoras — are what really scare me.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Think Universally, Act Neighborly” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, November 12, 2022
2. “Think universally, act neighborly” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times and Democrat [Orangeburg, South Carolina], November 15, 2022
3. “Free speech, Twitter and a demon-haunted world” by Joel Schlosberg, The Press [Millbury, Ohio], November 18, 2022