Grant Aldonas

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@kimsmithholmes Amen, Kim!

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@EBGresser A great economist and a better human being. 🙏❤️

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@D_A_Irwin @ericadyork @PIIE A great man and a good friend. God’s peace, Gary! 🙏❤️

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

The errors in China shock article go on the problems with the authors methodology. The authors conceded, although it’s buried in a footnote, that the downward trend in manufacturing employment of the United States was well advanced by the time China join the WTO. More seriously, in my view, was their attribution of Chinese import penetration into the US market to China’s accession to the WTO. Accession required liberalization of China’s import barriers. It involved no liberalization on the United States’ part. That inconvenient fact led the authors to assume without proving that the United States’ grant of permanent most favorite nation status afforded greater certainty of market access sufficient to account for a subsequent increase in Chinese exports to the United States. Absent proof of that effect, the article seemed nothing more an example of confusing correlation for causation.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@D_A_Irwin Amen to that, Doug! 👍🧐

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@jasonahart If “parasitical” were the standard, wouldn’t Charles Haywood‘s job would be among the first axed?

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

It was ever thus with rent-seeking interests. They reach ever deeper in their brother’s pocket regardless of the economic harm they cause and consider it their right to do so. It becomes an entitlement. The Vice President and Secretary of State have been expanding lately on what they call the “common good.” Seems to me the essence of the common good would include taking your hand out of your brother‘s pocket.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@PhilWMagness Pot versus kettle.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@KenGardner11 It wouldn’t lay a glove on him.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

Doug - Based on my own experience as a policymaker at USTR, Commerce, and, State, as well as serving as the Majority Chief Trade Counsel on the Senate Finance Committee, tariffs are a blunt instrument that cannot be tailored in any meaningful way that achieves a strategic purpose without incurring significant, often, unforeseen costs. The costs generally outweigh any strategic benefit and those who argue in favor of their use are either unaware of the tradeoffs or willfully ignore them. The Bush era Section 201 tariffs on steel imports imposed while I was Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade offers a case in point. They did not rescue our integrated steel producers from the over capacity that followed the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of China. They did, however, have a broader than expected deleterious effect on US manufacturing generally.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

Hi, Henry! I agree with you fundamentally as regards Fukuyama’s critique of Acemoglu’s thesis. Where I disagree is with Acemoglu’s focus on “extractive“ institutions as the main inhibitor of growth and economic development. The causal factor is far simpler - it is the openness of an economy, both internally and externally, that ultimately drives higher growth and broader economic development. There is no question institutions matter. But, the most important institutional arrangement is a guarantee of individual liberty, rather than the “extractive” nature of a nation’s government.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@kimsmithholmes Amen.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

I suspect they’re angst has less to do with student debt than the errant assumption that a degree would guarantee them the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed without recognizing the hard work required to sustain it. They’re angry that neither markets nor the universe will acknowledge their estimation of their self worth. The shameless appropriation use of the “working man” as a front for their personal agenda is a fraud.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@kimsmithholmes Your thoughts touch on a point I haven’t seen made forcefully enough in the face of the latest version of isolationist cant, Kim. The cost of deterrence is far lower than the cost of war with an aggressor on the march.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

Vance is both an economic, illiterate and wannabe social philosopher that has lost the plot. Humans flourish when they’re free; not under the oppression of the government who refuses to allow individuals to make their own economic choices. What Vance doesn’t grasp is there an inextricable link between economic freedom, and political freedom. In the absence of economic freedom, individuals have neither the wherewithal nor agency to exercise their political rights.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@DM11428 @LahavHarkov I get the attempt at humor, but you do realize these are both Brits, don’t you?

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

I agree it’s not going away anytime soon. What I am concerned about, in the meantime, is the lack of recognition among the American public regarding the tactics, employed by both right and left to delegitimize democracy in favor of orthodoxies that enchant the already committed architects of this radicalism, but bode ill for the freedom that is our heritage and the gift of sacrifices made by generations before us. I’m astonished how the rest of America fails to recognize the implications and it drives me to a disturbing conclusion - many Americans simply may not want to be free.

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@kimsmithholmes Amen, Kim! 👍

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@PhilWMagness Agreed. If only for the sake of irony, it would be humorous, if not terribly enlightening, to lampoon Derrida by deconstructing economists like Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik. Killing two (or three, in this case) birds with one stone. 😉

[Grant Aldonas @GrantAldonas]

@PhilWMagness A lawyer so disingenuous it’s an embarrassment to the JAG. This is a guy so far from the room where things happen that he learned of tariff policy changes Trump made while this naïf was testifying in front of Congress about the administration’s trade strategy.