The Babe's Still the Sultan

Have you noticed that there aren't great glorious celebrations of Barry Bonds breaking the all-time Home Run record? Not the remarkable coverage of Hank Aaron's own eclipse of it in April 1974 that I watched on TV as a wee lad, definitely. The differences between Bonds and Hammerin' Hank are cut and dry: Bonds extended his career by usage of human growth hormones that transformed his once athletic, svelte build into looking like he was King Kong. Hank Aaron was 190 lbs at his highest career weight, wet and in uniform - a skinny guy by today's standards. Hank Aaron hit the majority of his homers in the 1960s when the Pitcher ruled the Game and he never hit 50 homers in a season;Bonds had the luxury of playing in the expansion era where pitching talent is spread thin and umpires have a strike zone that Annie Oakley couldn't be on target. Barry Bonds is a cry-baby, a liar, cheat, racist and a spoiled brat spawned from a famous Baseball daddy who had his career mapped out for him from Day One. Hank Aaron got to where he did by his own talents and he began playing the Game in the Jim Crow era - lots of hurdles to jump. Aaron was always quiet and a class act and he had to endure real racism, but never threw the race card down himself, to my knowledge. Hammerin' Hank will always eclipse Barry Bonds no matter if Bonds extends his home run total to a thousand.

Though not the Baseball Freak that I once was and am not one of those who sat for hours with Bill James's sabermetrics nerd pursuits, Babe Ruth still remains in my book the Greatest All-Around Baseball Player that ever donned a major league uniform. Ruth not only hit the Big Ball many times over, he has a high career BA with it and in his younger and thinner days he was known for defensive skills and was a remarkably fast runner on the pads. Lest we forget that Babe began his career as a Pitcher, and he was a damned good pitcher. He swatted home-runs in the Teens during the tail-end of the DeadBall Era and when pitchers could use spitballs and cuff the ball to gain advantage over the hitter. Plus, he was lovable and was a fan favorite and excellent ambassador for the Game - unlike these arrogant Baseball stars today.

The Babe is in a League of his own and no ballplayer of any racial classification can ever match him no matter how many numbers crunchers beg to differ.

Long Live the Babe!

Paul Craig Roberts has an excellent excerpt from his book, The Return of the Robber Barons, at Economy in Crises -

http://www.economyincrises.org/articles/show/1105

titled "Do You Want Fries With That?" directly admonishing a counter-paradigm shift away from the McJob/ Wal-Mart Uber Alles,scanty productive service morass. Roberts was one of the architects behind Reagan's supply-side fantasies, but he has obviously turned a corner in his economic worldview since the early 80s, and I'm somewhat fond of the gent though he goes a wee bit too far in his rhetoric castigating the NeoCon's and NeoLibs empire building: Roberts recommendation that the US Army mutinies instead of deploying to Iraq....that crosses the line. Alas, Roberts can be a poster-child on how paleoconservatives like he is,industrial unionists, National Liberals and some libertarians(except the Free-Market Bolshevik faction),are basically stating the same macro thing; it's indirectly another call & a pressing necessity for a creation of a coalition of the above - what Howard J. Harrison is trying to educate his fellow conservatives at 'The Economic Nationalist'. I'll re-register as a 'Republican' if that party can get this way, take this hue of above characters, and return to the protectionist roots that at one time defined the Republican Party, who they were. The GOP needs a National Liberal wing - not the fuzzy-wuzzy chicanery of the old globalist Rockefeller liberalism of yesteryear(I never liked Nelson Rockefeller either). If the Democrats let their cultural-Bolshevik/ social issues obsessed West Coast cadre set the paces instead of focusing on where they and the economic infrastructure of the Republic needs to be( "it's protectionism, stupid!"), they shan't get any of my loyalty in name, either. The Democrats need more Dick Gephardt types and less Thomas -"the world is flat"- Friedmans, Clintons, and phony slobs like Al Gore(and is anyone besides me getting sick of Barak Obama mentioning 'hope' every other sentence?). Whatever one will say about Dennis Kucinich (he does physically and verbally wax like he has been transported from another galaxy), at least on economic issues he is the only genuine old New Deal Democrat in the race, and he's a solid trade protectionist who dares utter the T-word. Why can't the less weird Democrats take a page from his book on this?

*********************************

Just completed a forgettable bio, "Aaron Burr - Fallen Founder" by a Nancy Isenberg. Isenberg commences patting herself on the back by stating that not a genuine biography of Aaron Burr has ever been written and it is high time that one has. Reading her revisionist take on the third Vice President, killer of Alexander Hamilton, and probable traitor, one firstly grasps that this historian is hardly penning an objective biography. Isenberg fails to convincingly present Burr as a misunderstood and vilified person by jealous rivals and I think that her actual notes were from Gore Vidal's totally fictional account, Burr. Her take on Burr is that he was an outsider not because of his sleazy personality, money-grubbing debt-ridden existence,unprincipled pursuit of political power for the sake alone - but because Aaron Burr was a feminist. Yes. Burr did believe in rights for women and thought that women were just as intelligent as men, but this stance was not that unique among men of the 18th Century Enlightenment, and Burr's views were just that of Rousseau's. None of his detractors such as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, ever wrote or said a thing in disparagement of Burr because of his 'feminist' stance(they probably didn't know about the extent of it or care if they did),but because he was deemed untrustworthy in the political arena. Isenberg doesn't reflect that if both Hamilton and Jefferson could agree in their judgments concerning something and someone - there must be something to it. Washington himself couldn't abide Burr, and just about every historian of the Early Republic concedes that Washington was an excellent judge of character and was not known to carry grudges long-term without a valid reason for it.

Isenberg believes that Hamilton was totally at fault for the duel and dismisses the accepted fact that AH intended to throw away his shot, as was a common practice in dueling(few duels ever resulted in death or even injury in those days;it was a 'save face' ritual of honor:if a duelist could just prove his manhood by merelyshowing up it was regarded as satisfaction.Most duelists ended up shaking hands and repairing to a pub.) Isenberg asserts that Burr used the challenge to a duel as a last resort based on personal attacks by Hamilton. The real reason is that Hamilton prevented Burr from being President in 1800 and later Governor of New York. With Jefferson dropping his name from the ticket in 1804, Burr's political career was finished, and he took his vengeance out on the man who did the most to check his pursuits. I think that there is no question that Burr issued the challenge with the intent to kill. Isenberg insists that Hamilton was the one who sought to maim Burr and Burr's mortal wound on AH was 'defensive'. That Hamilton put on his spectacles and practiced aiming in the sunlight is proof to Isenberg that Hamilton was not intending to throw his shot. Again, this was part of the dueling ritual play : one had to act as if the duel was going to be carried out to full extent to save face, though usually the challenger and challenge would throw their shots. Isenberg's revisionist take on the Duel can easily be refuted by the fact that Hamilton did not set the hair-trigger on his pistol - something that gave the duelist an advantage to get off the first shot. Isenberg also doesn't cover in Burr, that Hamilton confided in friends before the duel that he was going to throw his shot away, and many counseled him against this, knowing that Aaron Burr meant business. The author's attempts to paint Burr as a benevolent fellow gets really cavalier when she discusses the Duel. Nancy Isenberg also does not mention that following Burr's mortal wound on Hamilton, Burr returned home and had a nice celebratory breakfast and carried on about his business as if it was just another day - hardly the behavior of someone who felt remorse of his actions. Aaron Burr himself never expressed remorse over killing Hamilton; into his old age he loved to narrate his account of the Duel to any who would listen. People with guilty consciences usually do not like to be reminded of their past and certainly do not voluntarily talk about them. Burr's panache was close to that of a sociopath, and he probably was one.

Hamilton and Burr had cordial relations until 1800, and shortly before their infamous duel Hamilton had even loaned Burr money. Though Burr belonged to the Republicans, he was not an ideologue and could had just as easily had been a Federalist(he even began making plays for them after Jefferson had dropped him from the ticket).One may ask, why did Hamilton have such a sudden ax to grind with Burr, and why did he support his hated foe Jefferson over Burr for President in 1800, then? Hamilton revealed in 1800 to a correspondent two conversations that he had had previously with Aaron Burr that made him dead-set against Burr attaining the pinnacle of political power: when AH was Treasury Secretary, Burr admonished Hamilton to take advantage of his power of the nation's money supply and use it for his own needs and wants instead of living in a rented house like a pauper. Later, during the 'XYZ Affair', when Washington vetoed AH's request that Burr be made a Brigadier General, Burr in a fury visited Hamilton and suggested that he use the Army for a coup. This clearly demonstrated to Hamilton or anyone else that even Jefferson would be a better man as chief executive.

Isenberg does also cast Jefferson in a unfavorable light as opposed to Burr and she's on par that the person who benefited from the Duel was TJ himself: one perennial political rival dead, the other's political career finished. Following Burr's killing of Hamilton, Jefferson wined and dined his outgoing Vice President at the White House when beforehand he avoided AB as much as possible. If it wasn't for Hamilton, Burr probably would had been sitting in the Presidential chair, but never would the Sage of Monticello acknowledge this. Later, Jefferson turned on Burr and tried to get a treason conviction on him(I concur that it was not proven that Burr intentionally set-out to create his own country on the Western frontier;too many bad witnesses and too murky what Burr was up to) to no avail.

Aaron Burr may not have been quite the genuine-article psycho, but the man was both privately and publicly corrupt. Burr the Feminist doesn't change these facts, and undoubtedly Isenberg lets her own feminism dictate her narrative of Burr? Not a good biography of Burr at all, and some more objective historian needs to give it a shot. Wait for Isenberg's bio of Burr to hit the library if you want to read it.

Or better yet - buy my copy, please.

Responding to Howard Harrison's comment regarding "crunchy conservatives" in previous post, his description of them makes them wax like unique specimens;however I have yet to meet any people that are this way, but I don't travel in the ranks of the churched-up people - kind of a secular monk I am. All in all, I do not think that they should be antagonized and the sane ones should be cultivated into the broad American anti-globalist movement. Unlike many secular oriented people, I do have a sense of respect for scholarly orthodox Christians, and we share the same Western culture, naturally; secularists &religionists are both *Faustian Man* to put it into SpenglerSpeak.

Prejudices do exist to prevent any broad umbrella anti-globalist movement: many liberal oriented bipeds do not want to break bread with "right-wing religious freaks", many conservatives do not want to be involved with left- of-center people. There is probably a mere .0000325% of the American population that would gel with the basic worldview of Left-Federalist, for that matter. Many anti-globalist folks just prefer their own version, go it alone, come hell or high water, and are comfortable within the cubby hole of their own box. That is fine, but as Howard pointed out, there is just 3% here and there, scattered like a tipped-over jigsaw puzzle. The fragments need assembly if a serious offensive on Globalism can manifest - the cosmopolitan multinational corporations and the politicians in their pockets hold all the cards at the moment, and they know it. Plus, they have a small but powerful edifice of useful idiots from the intelligentsia that enable them . This is crunch time, and there is not much leisure to go wobbly on protectionism, and the anti-globalist fragments have to be assembled yesterday. There are some politicos that are turning around(more than there were just a few years ago) so the situation may not be entirely dire, but it remains.

The anti-globalist movement needs a single aggressive lobbyist effort. As much as I detest the 'fourth sphere of government'( on insomniac nights I count sleazy lobbyists with a bullet in their heads instead of counting sheep), this appears to be the sole pragmatic way available. There is the question of money, and anti-globalists don't have many rich people that would gel to the cause and donate, unlike other lobbying outfits on the Hill. Thus, resources would have to be pooled together and the broad anti-globalist movement, those who want to participate in a concentrated effort, would have to sit-down and agree on a consensus of core -issues and push them. Many would not want to forfeit what I think are medium to light issues;some have not grasped the crucial aspects of this period and they need to understand that they will not get all of their pet projects as a working reality - to make the big ones a reality the other issues are give&take, on the auction block. Secular liberals need to get it that there will always be religious oriented folks around,vise versa. Well, I like making fun of some of them too, as said, but if they are protectionists opposed to predator-economics and are concerned for the survival of the independent constitutional Republic - they're my boys. They can mock some of my stuff too(little ol' me is of no consequence one way or another) - I don't care as long as we got the core intact and are in gear to go out kick ass and take names later, as that saying goes.

Distributists, Greens, Bolsheviks,Fundies, Spengler & Midgets..

Added on the left at 'Blogs& Websites' is that of the Distributist Review. They are not economic-nationalists and I find some of their social and religious views a bit daffy, but they are earnest anti-globalists and love to bash laissez-faire. So, this here agnostic from Protestant/ confessional-Lutheran background unilaterally finds allies in traditionalist RC's. Strange realm, this anti-globalist movement. All in all, I have curiosity of some aspects of Distributist economics and it is a valid alternative to the current state of affairs; the Distributist's spiel sure beats the Catholicism coupled with Predator-economics that one will read at Bill Buckley's, The National Review...

I believe in Meme- building; get the various information out of the anti-globalist movement under an umbrella, even when lots of details of the meme I don't particularly jive with. Oh yes, I do have a threshold: I wager that the Communist Party USA and the Ku Klux Klan are against globalism too, but I won't let those PukeStains out of the rain.

My goal is to find economic protectionist Greens to include them here in 'Blogs &Websites', but all searches for virtual pages directly endorsing this has come up empty, or they thump other things that I find too wacko to bring them on-board with a good conscience. It is needed to spirit the Greens away from Al Gore& the Davos Group; witness that some Free-Market Bolsheviks are making a play for them with 'Green-privatization', 'Eco-market', hooplah. The Green angle is up for grabs and economic-nationalists need to cultivate them. Personally, I would love to see a Third Industrial Revolution commenced with clean energy as the principle for it, if possible(don't like Our Planet looking like a shit-trap either and I hate smog). I do believe that the notion is worth some good R&D from the Top on down, and wish that the Greens thought the same way. Nevertheless, we have to re-industrialize asap.This sounds alarmist, but I think that time is running out for the USA. Stinging globalism on the margins will not get it done; when/if the window cracks open - slip through it and go for the jugular, shoot for the late Round KO like in a Rocky movie....."Yo, Free Traitors!... youse goin' down."

The Old Ravi Batra demonstrated that tariffs are ecologically friendly, and 'tis a pity that he didn't follow up and pursue this angle better thereafter. He once perhaps had the ticket to ride for American Greens. However, too many Greens are formerly 'Reds' & remain Luddites, and they have an abiding hatred concerning anything smacking of technological industrial capitalism of any type, even the dirigist/mixed national system that Left-Federalist spews out, at times daily. This - they need to work on.

******************

One of Oswald Spengler's themes is second religiousness; when a civilization is about to collapse, a super-nova of traditional religion explodes, a call to return to the 'True Faith' comes into vogue. Entertaining the prospect that Spengler was a sharp -customer with his organic/cyclic theory of history(I'm a doubting Thomas), indicators are here today in circa 2007 that this 'second religiousness' is manifesting: Pope Benedict endorses a return to the Latin Mass and has all but 86'd the ecumenism of Vatican II;Protestant fundamentalism still rages in the Americas despite recent scandals with their gurus, like Ted Haggard(LMAO!). America, the 1st Modern Nation/state, has made a plunge into the Middle Ages as we witness in pop culture with Fantasy oriented stuff, the assault on Evolution, the quenching of biological research of human beings and their diseases('let's not play God, now!'). But part of me understands why Fundies would think certain things with these activist-lawyers from the cultural-Bolshevik ACLU wanting to take away Christmas trees from their kids in public settings(but the X-mas tree is a pagan thing, I know.)....Left-Federalist is against Bolshevism in any form even when they trample on the Fundies. The real truth is that I ordinarily like virtually slapping them both around, role- playing Moe Howard on The Three Stooges. Why, pray tell? Well, I think it is needed...

..and it is also - fun:-)

Given that I had to stop running over midgets in my truck(I heard somewhere that it is against the law - even vehicular homicide on midgets. Can you believe that stupid law?!?), I need some other outlet that is physically non-violent to manage my 'anger issues'...

Right....to take a broad interpretation of second-religiousness, perhaps my own plea for a return to the Federalist-American System is a symptom of this? I do possess a near- religious devotion to protectionism...or rather, Spengler was full of shit. I hope so. If he was right, we are toast in the United States of America & EU...

'Nixon Shock', Revisited

August 15, 1971 was the date that America's postWW2 international economic hegemony ended officially. President Richard M. Nixon, an avowed disciple of the free-market and also free-trade, announced to the world that the United States was closing the dollar's convertibility to gold that had operated as the international reserve currency at a fixed-rate since the Bretton Woods accords in 1944. Nixon also proclaimed a 90 day wage and price freeze and slapped a 10% surcharge on all imports(another 'tariff avoidance' phrase). Though attempts at devaluation of the Dollar were made thereafter, no international agreement could be attained to reset a fixed rate. Hence, the floating currency exchange that we have now.

All of the Nixon Shock was supposed to be temporary and most of it was. That such a free-marketer such as Nixon would do such a thing in the first place, delves into the complexity of the man. Nixon could be said to be our one -and -only Shakespearean President ; RMN is a multi-act play taking the observer through triumphs, tragedies, and even comedy if one looks for it. Nixon was an introverted intellectual type who couldn't abide intellectuals; he always felt like an outsider of the Eastern Establishment, but at times tried to cozy up to them. Nixon was at heart a conservative, but did liberal things as President and when he was a Senator and Congressman: a Red Baiter who nailed Soviet agent Alger Hiss and talked about the Communist menace - then opened up to Mao's China and pursued detente with the USSR. One of Nixon's favorite Presidents was the 'idealistic' Woodrow Wilson, but he was a perennial pragmatist, Realpolitik was the foreign policy that he pursued. On his infamous tapes one can hear Nixon ranting about "Jews", but no Administration had more Jewish top level officials, and he risked a confrontation with the USSR to bail Israel's tookas out of the '73 Yom Kippur War. Though disappointed and irritated in perceived anti-Americanism of European leaders, he nearly worshipped Charles de Gaulle who was the most anti-American post-WW2 leader in the West and a certified ungrateful son-of-a-bitch. Nixon could play the piano, was an aficionado of Classical Music, a bookworm, but he spoke in terms of Football and identified with the Hardhats and the small-farmers and would often mock and deride arty sophisticated types in Archie Bunker fashion. He was a populist who coined the "Great Silent Majority" phrase, but he set up an 'imperial Presidency' and barricaded himself around a select group of advisers, many of them corrupt DirtBalls like Chuck Colson. Nixon was a hard-charging , go for the jugular,campaigner who disliked shaking hands and did not want to be touched , even by his wife. He was a natural paranoid, but when he trusted someone, it was often the wrong person to confide in; a man from the quiet and somnolent Quaker faith but he made friends with fire- breathing evangelists like Billy Graham, but he did not attend a church and seldom mentioned religion in his speeches. Nixon liked dirty jokes and took an interest in the extramarital affairs of his peers, but no evidence was ever uncovered that he ever had a mistress or even a one-night stand. He liked talking tough in foreign policy and bombed the bejesus out of Hanoi, but was always motivated to build an international order that would guarantee peace, at least between the Big Players of his day. Nixon inherited civil war conditions at the start of his Presidency and spoke of "law and order", yet he flagrantly broke the law and thought that he was entitled to do so.....

One can go on and on psychoanalysing Richard M. Nixon, the enormity of contrasts and contradictions in his policies and his personality. The dialectic of Nixon is transparent in the Shock of August 1971: he had free-marketeers like Arthur Burns on his economic team, yet he opted for the plan of practical Treasury Secretary John Connolly(some say that Connolly &Nixon were soul-mates). The Shock was short-term and was primarily motivated for his re-election; Nixon was not an economic President, and to his credit, he at least admitted that he did not understand a great portion of it(unlike LBJ, Carter, Reagan etc who pretended to understand and didn't). Such a free-thinker on foreign policy(contrary to legend, China, triangular foreign policy was his idea - not Kissinger's), Nixon was like a dutiful schoolboy taking notes from his economic and trade advisers:he'd cram hard for the test and then quickly forget afterwards what he had learned.

Nixon had developed an abiding detestment of wage/price controls when he had briefly served on one of the numerous bureaucratic War Boards in 1942, yet he implemented Wage-Price controls as part of his Shock. Though most only lasted 90 days, it was a glaring contradiction and contributed to inflationary problems in the long term. A 'fiscal conservative', he also claimed that "we are all Keynesians now" just at the time when intentional deficit spending was coming out of fashion, and was one of the biggest reasons that the US experienced spikes in inflation in the late 60s, early 70s. Though he spoke of the virtues of having hard-currency, Nixon took the US Dollar off the gold reserve that was the cornerstone of the Bretton Woods system. In his defense, Nixon didn't have a good decision to make on this point: other nations, because of inflation and the unilateral anti-protectionist policies of previous Presidential administrations, had accumulated surplus Yankee dollars that they did not want to hold indefinitely. The fear that said nations would cash them in for Yankee gold as they were entitled to were genuine. Especially since Nixon's hero, France's Chuck de Gaulle, intentionally& for the sake alone commenced undermining the US Dollar by accumulating gold with France's stockpiled Federal Reserve Notes in the early 1960s(why RMN loved this bastard is to me one of his biggest mysteries, enigma). Though West Germany gave a verbal agreement not to exchange dollars for gold, the danger was there that other nations would begin to panic and Ft. Knox would had been cleaned out in a matter of a few weeks if they did. Nixon had no choice but to close the gold window in this circumstance. It would had been more irresponsible and he would had had a lot more explaining to do if he would had allowed all the gold reserve in the country to flee, I think.

As an economic-nationalist, the 10% import surcharge(tariff) was the only genuinely good part of the Nixon Shock. Thanks to post- WW2 unilateral trade liberalization, the United States , for the first time in a long, long time began running a trade deficit by 1971 - something that was shocking in itself then. Where Nixon went wrong on this is that he only employed it short-term(again) and caved in to protests at the initial Tokyo Round in 1973 - which by then he shifted back to the free-market, free-trade policies of Arthur Burns - a Milton Friedman devotee. Bretton Woods ended on Nixon's watch;instead of taking the US back to it's protectionist roots when the opportunity required it, he left the worst thing about the Bretton Woods edifice in place when he could had easily knocked it off then for good by keeping his tariff in place, raising it if need be, and telling the whiners and sob sisters at the Tokyo Round to take a hike if they didn't like it. He could have nipped globalism in the bud then and we wouldn't have protectionist ranters and ravers at blogs like 'Left-Federalist' today. America would perhaps not be in the mess that we are now in trade if Nixon would had thought in the long -run in August of '71 instead of chiefly fretting about his up-coming re-election.

Nixon was a patriot but he neglected the economic and trade side of patriotism and shown gross irresponsibility in this department - to me this dwarfs Watergate and letting Kissinger talk him into prolonging the Vietnam conflict, giving the green light for the Chilean coup in '73...

In closing, Nixon was a character who had huge potential to have been both a benevolent human being and a great President, but he let his dichotomous personality, the inner demons of his dark side - 'Tricky Dick' - over-ride the noble qualities that the man had. Like a lot of organically brilliant men, he often did very stupid things and never could find the synthesis between the Idealist Nixon and the Practical Nixon.

Dr. Ravi Batra Responds(and so I retort)

This email reply from Ravi Batra was received today by me:

"I have abandoned my old stance about competitive protectionism for two reasons. First, the U.S trade dependence has sharply increased since 1993, when The Myth of Free Trade' appeared. Our trade deficit is also much higher.So competitive protectionism should be useful in the long run;but in the short run it could destroy the U.S and world economy and bring discredit to the idea, which will be then discarded. Secondly, while working with some politicians I discovered that no kind of protectionist has any chance of adoption in today's world. That's why I thought of the export exchange rate plan presented in my latest books. This way the workers would get higher wages and growth would improve. My first interest is removing poverty through practical plans, and that's why I moved away from outright protectionism."

Et tu, Ravi?

In another time and place I would had been flattered getting an email from a reputable economist, but this one was - though expected - a kick in the groin. Batra was once one of my contemporary heroes.Ordinarily a email response deserves another in kind. But I dragged my readers into this controversy with Dr. Batra's flip-flop on tariffs, so I will deconstruct my would-be counter response in draft here:

Batra was correct that the trade deficit and dependence on foreign imports has increased since the appearance of his magnum opus. But to me, this should be the reason why we need protectionism NOW more than ever than in the dawn of the NAFTA era. A simple analogy is that when one is in a fight for his life with bully, the time is crucial to shout out 'Hey Rube!' and ask for further protection against a deadly enemy.

Competitive protectionism would "destroy the U.S. and world economy" in the short term, according to Batra. Huh? We are already sunk here! Did protectionism get us in the economic trade morass that we are up to our eyeballs in?? No! Protectionist economics built the United States into a industrial dynamo and ignored the snickers of doom from the British-Manchester Free Traders in the 19th Century.And how would the USA by returning to its natural protectionism "destroy the world economy"? Japan, China, most of the other Asian Tigers are highly protectionist economies, they are integral in the international economy yet they thrive(mainly on our backs). As written ad nauseum here, there is no place else in the Solar System that Asia can market their exports at high volume than in the USA. Contrary to what most economists will tell you, they need us much more than we need them. America is addicted to debt, Asia requires a neomercantilist exporting edifice to thrive and survive. They will pay the tariff kicking and screaming. Just close the Treasury Bond window to foreign investment and announce that we are responsible for our own debts for now on - via earmarks from tariff revenue. Time to pull this monkey off our backs

Batra claims that there are no politicians that would accept a protectionist trade format. It demonstrates what kind of politicians that he has been talking to by this statement. Actually, Dr. Batra has abandoned protectionism when now more politicians are swinging near economic-nationalism and the Free Traders are going on the defensive; we don't have them by their balls - yet - but the movement, the winds of economic trade change, is growing. Feature that Dr. Batra likes patting himself on the back for all the economic predictions that he claims to have made that came true. He has certainly missed the boat on this one!

As written in the previous post, Batra's "export exchange rate plan" is lifted primarily from the Bretton Woods system where it tried to maintain an international balance of trade via similar fixed- rate pegging of the US Dollar, which operated as the international reserve currency backed a certain percentage of gold from Ft. Knox (this plan was implemented over the objections of Keynes that was the brain-child of Harry Dexter White - revealed post-mortem to have been a Soviet agent, btw). Oh yeah...Bretton Woods worked as long as Europe and Japan were busy reconstructing their devastated economic infrastructure in the 50s, and they rode the US Dollar to do it. For it's time and purpose, I agree that Bretton Woods was the right thing to do. Yet, in hindsight, Bretton Woods should had been abandoned as early as 1958 when Western Europe and Japan were back on their feet and beginning to export in large volumes. The time was then to adopt bilateral reciprocal protectionism, but the unilateral Free Trade dogma had claimed such a stranglehold on both Parties by the 1960s. Instead, the U.S. waited until the 'Nixon Shock' of 1971 to come to terms that Bretton Woods was detrimental to our national economy;Nixon only employed temporary measures that made the economy appear robust to guarantee his re-election in 1972. This is my main beef with Richard M. Nixon - not Watergate or prolonging the Vietnam War(another story for another post).

Batra doesn't write that fixed-rate export pricing of the US dollar only worked as long as the USA had undisputed international economic hegemony;it's proven that it's not feasible for a balance of trade between robust economies. Neither does Batra use Bretton Woods as reference point for his plan(does he want the reader to believe that he dreamed it up himself?. I'm not a professional economist like he is, but I know more than the usual about economic history. He sounds a wee bit like Lyndon LaRouche with this 'fixed-rate' obsession.).

Dr. Batra avoids details on how his exchange rate plan will solidify "high wages" for industrial workers in the USA. Batra is also for high corporate taxes without loopholes for the predator Overclass. How and why will the American affluent invest in hard capital in the domestic USA with his plan? There is no reason for them to do so. Even if Batra's plan somehow created a trade balance, he ignores that we are a post-industrial economy with dwindling high wage industries left! Nobody benefits from it accept the exporters into the United States, though they don't get as much as before.

Via his religious devotion to the Hindu neo-humanist guru, PR Sarkar, Batra's #1 aim is to eradicate global poverty; in his quest(noble, yes) he ignores the fact that one has to firstly mind the store, and he has now embraced TINA wholeheartedly. Frankly, he's a goddamn sell-out! And that honestly pained me to write this.

Hopefully, in years to come, Ravi Batra will wistfully look over all his published books and come upon 'Myth of Free Trade' and utter - "I had it right then."

Ravi Batra: Romancing TINA

As I've commented over at 'The Economic Nationalist' site, Dr. Ravi Batra's , "The Myth of Free Trade", stands alongside Buchanan's "The Great Betrayal" as premier texts in the contemporary protectionist movement with me. I have read "The Myth of Free Trade" more than once and have copious notes in the margins such as "hurray!" and whatnot. Ravi Batra's program is domestic competitive protectionism and expends a great deal of time in all of his texts tearing the theological laissez-fairist's arguments apart quite convincingly.

But something happened to Batra from the publication of The Myth (1994) to the 21st Century and it is disappointing.

Though Batra's last two books - "Greenspan's Fraud"; "The New Golden Age" - maintain his basic economic doctrine as in The Myth of Free Trade, he no longer supports a tariff-based trade system though he remains a staunch critic of the current abortion that some call 'Free Trade'. On page 180 of The Myth, Batra writes in no uncertain terms - "Tariffs are the best way of granting protection. They are simple and easy to administer and also produce ample revenue for governments strapped by budget deficits". Then Batra writes in total contradiction to this above in 'The New Golden Age' - "These are the days of globalization, and the whole world is interlinked by trade. Tariffs would start a trade war, and immediately impoverish everybody. Besides, they are not permitted by the World Trade Organization, to which our nation is committed." (page 204).

Batra now proposes of pegging the dollar to the Yuan & Yen for a fixed-rate export price where somehow in the process(he is hardly clear) the trade deficit gets bottomed out with no inflationary costs, and China and Japan is buying Yankee made products as much as we here are buying theirs. What he doesn't write is that Chinese consumers can't afford imports anyway and neither do they want them, neither will their government ever un-protect itself(why should they?), and neither will the Japanese. We are a post-industrial country with little to export overseas anyway largely because of globalism. Without protective tariffs to earmark funds therof for re- industrialization, how can it export goods now? We have almost zero electronics , textiles to export, and our big ,huge SUVs and trucks - few humans outside the United States want them, and can't afford them if they do. Asians and Europeans like small vehicles and they have to buy small. Besides, the engineering quality of US Autos leave something to be desired for the past three decades.
Even if Batra's currency manipulation arguably 'worked', where are the US export industries?? He has an answer - raise corporate taxes. I am privy to this, but raising taxes on the Overclass alone will not get them away from high speculative financial wheeling and dealing and turn them back into the captains of industry as they used to be. Raising taxes on the Ueber-wealthy alone will only make them save a bit more of their own money, and they most likely will not use it to invest in hard capital. With tariffs and public encouragement from the revenue accumulated from them, it sends a message to the Overclass :'invest in hard industries again and we will protect you'. A high tax on the upper 10% or so should be in a sense, voluntary: "invest in hard capital or pay". To me this is a good bargain given that we all know how the wealthy would rather throw money into the ocean rather than to use it to pay taxes. But to Batra, high taxes alone will get them more economically responsible, and that is just balderdash.

Batra contradicts himself when he wrote in "The Myth" that inflationary spikes from tariffs are largely fear-mongering from the free-traders given that in the 19th Century when we had steep tariffs, prices remained relatively stable; America's biggest rises in inflation came the same year that it officially went to Free Trade, 1973. Dr. Batra spent practically an entire chapter in his "The Myth of Free Trade" documenting that high volumes of international trade naturally expends fossil fuels and increases pollution, and admonishes nations to be as regional as possible in trade for this obvious environmental reason. Tariffs, he believed then, were ecologically sound because they would have a reduction in global trade(tell that to Al Gore who is both a Free Trader and an ecological mandarin) and better jump- start countries to localize their own industries. He forgot all of this in his latest book and has joined the hand-ringers and those who think that they can manipulate currency exchanges to get balanced trade. Batra needs to remember that that is what the Bretton Woods post WW2 system attempted to do, and it crashed in on the USA in the late 60s and we have this mess now just because of an entire generation of tariff-phobic economists and the dimwit politicians who listen to them. Batra also seems to have co-opted 'comparative advantage' as well - he should know better!

I wrote Dr. Batra a cordial email, asking if he could explain his turn-around on tariffs. Even better yet, I gave him the addy to 'Left-Federalist' to comment here on the subject if he would be so kind to instruct those who read this blog, better clarify his position. I still am gaga on his plan of 'competitive domestic protectionism', but I can't conceive of it manifesting without the implementation of tariffs - something that he was once a believer in too. Plus, Batra's surrender to the global trade entanglements is quite a letdown since I have recommended him to fellow economic-nationalists before. The Myth of Free Trade remains in its present hierarchy with me, but I cannot think otherwise that Dr. Batra has become another economic -Laodicean. He is not the first economist to change his position(s),but usually when economists do so, they go into detail why they have done so(such as when John Maynard Keynes wrote his long, "The End of Laissez-Faire", explicitly explaining why he rejected Free Trade after being one of its typically British proponents). Batra neither goes into detail for his change on tariffs, and neither does he mention in his latest books that he once was a tariff-advocate. A novice reader of Batra would get confused quite soon if he/she read 'The Myth of Free Trade' after reading his latest two books.

Ravi Batra owes his readers and fans an explanation.