We should not be surprised Trump flip flops on this. He never espouses any consistent ideology.
Free markets benefit everyone, including people who are not
free. The power of the free market is
unfathomable to man. This is part of the
reason so many despise it and turn away from it. Think about it!
Quote
of the Day from page 43 of F.A. Hayek’s seminal work The Road to Serfdom
“The idea of complete centralisation of the
direction of economic activity still appalls most people, not only because of
the stupendous difficulty of the task, but even more because of the horror
inspired by the idea of everything being directed from a single centre. If we
are nevertheless rapidly moving towards such a state this is largely because
most people still believe that it must be possible to find some Middle Way
between ‘atomistic’ competition and central direction. Nothing indeed seems at
first more plausible, or is more likely to appeal to reasonable people, than
the idea that our goal must be neither the extreme decentralisation of free
competition, nor the complete centralization of a single plan, but some
judicious mixture of the two methods. Yet mere common sense proves a treacherous
guide in this field. Although competition can bear some admixture of
regulation, it cannot be combined with planning to any extent we like without
ceasing to operate as an effective guide to production. Nor is
"planning" a medicine which, taken in small doses, can produce the
effects for which one might hope from its thoroughgoing application. Both
competition and central direction become poor and inefficient tools if they are
incomplete; they are alternative principles used to solve the same problem, and
a mixture of the two means that neither will really work and that the result
will be worse than if either system had been consistently relied upon. Or, to
express it differently, planning and competition can be combined only by
planning for competition, but not by planning against competition.”
Bottom line:
-
Nobody
really wants Centralized Control or Socialism
-
But
free markets and socialism work against each other. So “moderates” mixing the two ideologies will
fail.
-
The
best answer is in complete and total free markets and free trade.
-
There
is no such thing as unfair trade. All
trade is, by definition, fair when it is free.
I saw a great line in this article
by Dan Mitchell:
“Foreign
aid: When you take the money from poor people in a rich country and give it to
the rich people in a poor country.”
Hits the nail on the head.
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