Sound advice from US Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): “As a rule, Americans shouldn’t trust any bill so large that it has to be delivered by handcart.” He’s referring to the latest “National Defense Authorization Act,” which weighs in at more than 3,000 pages.

Stopping at “Americans shouldn’t trust any bill” would improve Lee’s rule, but he’s a politician, so let’s give him some (cough) Lee-way and credit him with a good start.

There’s plenty of bad stuff crammed into the latest NDAA, not least renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which should really be called the “Illegally and Unconstitutionally Spying on Americans Act.” But as usual when it comes to NDAAs, I prefer to focus on the over-arching badness of the thing.

According to the congressional conference report on the bill, it “allocates $841.4 billion to the Pentagon, $32.4 billion to the Department of Energy and $438 million for other ‘defense-related activities.'”

That’s $1.3 trillion, or nearly $3,900 from each American adult and child, to maintain a gargantuan military machine that has about as much to do with “national defense” as the latest reboot of Frasier has to do with the original Cheers.

At present, the US armed forces include more than 1.3 million active duty troops and about 800,000 reservists.  That’s about the same level as 50 years ago, when the US was just extricating itself from the Vietnam quagmire, when various automations (such as drones) were in their infancy, and when warm infantry bodies were a much bigger factor in war-fighting compared to today’s emphasis on air power.

In theory, at least, the US is at something called “peace” these days. Instead of fighting its own wars, it mostly farms them out to proxies like Ukraine and Israel, or at least “partners” with indigenous puppet regimes for manpower (e.g. Afghanistan).

And in truth, the US has few if any “defense” worries apart from the blowback its direct and proxy misadventures tend to culminate in. No other power in the world, let alone the western hemisphere, possesses the ability  to invade, conquer, and occupy a United States with so much as 1/10th of its current military capabilities.

The US “defense” budget isn’t about “defense.” It’s equal parts corporate welfare, workfare for poor and middle class youth who need money for college,  and “mad money” for politicians to get their megalomaniac on, trying to run the rest of the world as viciously and incompetently as they run their own little piece of it, with.

Which explains why it will pass in something like its current form. Lobbyists and politicians see lots of money — lots of YOUR money — and they want it. Ideally, all of it.

As I explain every time an NDAA bill comes up, remember that “defense spending” could be slashed by 90% without significant negative impact on “the national defense.”

Having remembered that, what to do with the knowledge? I guess you could call “your” congressional representatives, but that won’t do any good. They’ll keep blowing that money … as long as you keep giving it to them.

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

“All [Donald Trump] did was impose tariffs, which raise the prices for every American,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie pointed out in the  December 6 GOP primary debate. “You can’t say he was good on trade because he didn’t trade. He didn’t change one Chinese policy in the process. He failed on it.”

Christie’s correct  that tariffs make the American consumers who pay them poorer, and that Trump’s “trade war” with China hasn’t resulted in “victory” when it comes to policy changes on that government’s part.

But does that make Trump’s tariff obsession a “failure?”

Success and failure are measured in terms of accomplishing, or not accomplishing, particular objectives.

If we assume that Trump’s actual aim was to increase the ratio of American exports to Chinese imports, then yes, he failed. Miserably. The US “trade deficit” with China has increased, not decreased, since Trump’s inauguration.

That’s actually kind of good news. The term “trade deficit” sounds bad, but what it actually means is that (in aggregate) we’re giving up less and less of our stuff in return for more and more of their stuff.

The bad news is that we’re paying more and more for … well, everything. That’s not ENTIRELY due to trade policy, but it is to some extent. And instead of assuming that tariffs are intended to address “trade deficits,” it’s worth looking at who benefits from those tariffs versus who suffers.

Christie took notice of one suffering demographic: American consumers. Tariffs jack up our prices.

Chinese workers also suffer if there aren’t as many jobs making as much stuff (whether for domestic consumption or export).

The beneficiaries of US tariffs on Chinese goods are American businesses who compete with Chinese businesses to make stuff and sell that stuff to us.

Simplified version (there are factors other than the ones I’m noticing here):

Suppose you can buy a Chinese-made widget for $1.00, but an American-made widget costs $1.25. You’re more likely to buy the Chinese widget.

But if the US government puts a 30-cent tariff on Chinese widgets, the American company can increase its price to $1.29 and still sell its version to you more cheaply than the Chinese version.

Sure, you pay 29 cents more (or four cents more, if you preferred American-made widgets for some reason other than price point) for the same widget that used to cost you $1.00/$1.25 — but hey, that American company’s owners make out like bandits, even after they pay lobbyists to talk politicians into imposing the tariff.

The real question is whether politicians like Trump are screwing you because they really believe their pro-tariff nonsense, or whether they’re just screwing you on behalf of their Big Business contributors.

That question pretty much answers itself.

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

Despite taking socialists to task for being leery of the president (Joe Biden) who boasted that he “beat the socialist,” Justin Vassallo may as well be wearing a red suit for the message he’s bringing reds.

After all, according to Vassallo’s “The Left’s Foolish Attack on Bidenomics” (Compact Magazine, December 5), socialists need not bother with nostalgia for Michael Harrington’s The Other America inspiring JFK and LBJ to launch the War on Poverty six decades ago, when they wield considerable influence on the federal economic policy of 2024.

Not only are their reservations about endorsing Joe Biden’s economic policies enough of a threat to his re-election to be worth warning against, but even measures seemingly “a ‘gift’ to capital in the form of various subsidies” have the potential to be “activated through public policy within the framework of market society” through what leftist historian Martin J. Sklar called a “socialist investment component.”

Vassallo finds it “ironic” that “the most militant leftist critiques of industrial policy echo the libertarian right’s complaint that it is but another iteration of ‘crony capitalism’.” Ironically, it was Sklar who helped fellow radical scholars realize that progressive interventions “were always limited to those that would allow corporate capitalism to function more efficiently,” as noted in the editorial comments by Blanche Wiesen Cook, Alice Kessler Harris and Ronald Radosh in their 1973 survey Past Imperfect: Alternative Essays in American History. Sklar was also included in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, coedited by Radosh with free-market libertarian Murray N. Rothbard.

Rothbard and Radosh’s joint introduction notes that their respective goals of “removing the privileges of the large corporations and returning to laissez-faire” and “a decentralized socialist economy” showed the “major political and philosophical differences between the editors.” Yet they shared an “awareness that the nature of liberalism has been distorted to mask large corporate control over American politics is essential for interpreting our past development, and for understanding how the Leviathan Corporate State operates today.”

Vassallo gets it exactly backward: It was Sklar and comrades like Radosh who helped make libertarians less automatically in favor of big business, and leftists wary of assuming that state support is friendly to labor bargaining power and consumer safety. The “peculiar dissociation from the ideas and strategies that animated Bernie Sanders and European left populists” is, if anything, a sign of how much the current left has forgotten of what the New Left learned.

While deriding “Econ 101 certainties that haven’t determined actually existing capitalism since the Industrial Revolution, if they ever did,” Vassallo is arrogant enough to prescribe “what the American economy should be producing more of — and conversely, what it could use less of.” (A proposed “new synthesis” of John Maynard Keynes and Alexander Hamilton had already long been the norm in American political economy when Hamilton was a trivia question in a Got Milk? ad.) Such compulsory counsel is the equivalent of getting coal for Christmas, plus a bill for the coal.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Time for Leviathan Reduction Action” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], December 14, 2023
2. “Time for Leviathan Reduction Action” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, December 15, 2023
3. “Time for Leviathan Reduction Action” by Joel Schlosberg, The News [Kingstree, South Carolina], January 3, 2024