George Will: A Plan to Make America 1953 Again

A plan to make America 1953 again



By George F. Will Opinion writer December 28, 2016

It is axiomatic that if someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored. This explains today’s revival of protectionism, which is a plan to make America great again by making it 1953 again.

This was when manufacturing’s postwar share of the labor force peaked at about 30 percent. The decline that began then was not caused by manufactured imports from today’s designated villain, China, which was a peasant society. Rather, the war-devastated economies of competitor nations were reviving. And, domestically, the age of highly technological manufacturing was dawning.

Since 1900, the portion of the U.S. workforce in agriculture has declined from 41 percent to less than 2 percent. Output per remaining farmer and per acre has soared since millions of agricultural workers made the modernization trek from farms to more productive employment in city factories. Was this trek regrettable?

According to a Ball State University study, of the 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, trade accounted for 13 percent of job losses and productivity improvements accounted for more than 85 percent: “Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers [in 2010]. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.” Is this regrettable? China, too, is shedding manufacturing jobs because of productivity improvements.

Douglas A. Irwin of Dartmouth College notes that Chinese imports may have cost almost 1 million manufacturing jobs in nearly a decade, but “the normal churn of U.S. labor markets results in roughly 1.7 million layoffs every month.” He notes that there are more than 45 million Americans in poverty, “stretching every dollar they have.” The apparel industry employs 135,000 Americans. Can one really justify tariffs that increase the price of clothing for the 45 million in order to save some of the 135,000 low-wage jobs? Anyway, if tariffs target apparel imports from China, imports will surge from other low-wage developing nations.

The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip, who reports that there are 334,000 vacant manufacturing jobs, says that when Jimmy Carter tried to protect U.S. manufacturers by restricting imports of Japanese televisions, imports from South Korea and Taiwan increased. When those were restricted, manufacturers in Mexico and Singapore benefited.

In his book “An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy,” Marc Levinson recalls the 1970 agonies about Japanese bolts, nuts and screws. Under the 1974 Trade Act, companies or unions claiming “serious injury” — undefined by the law — from imports could demand tariffs to price the imports out of the market. Of the hundreds of U.S. bolt, nut and screw factories, some were, Levinson writes, “highly automated, others so old that gloved workers held individual bolts with tongs to heat them in a forge.” A three-year, 15 percent tariff enabled domestic producers to raise their prices, thereby raising the costs of many American manufacturers. By one estimate, each U.S. job “saved” cost $550,000 as each bolt-nut-screw worker was earning $23,000 on average annually. And by the mid-1980s, inflation-adjusted sales of domestic makers were 15 percent below the 1979 level.

Levinson notes that Ronald Reagan imposed “voluntary restraints” on Japanese automobile exports, thereby creating 44,100 U.S. jobs. But the cost to consumers was $8.5 billion in higher prices, or $193,000 per job created, six times the average annual pay of a U.S. autoworker. And there were job losses in sectors of the economy into which the $8.5 billion of consumer spending could not flow. The Japanese responded by sending higher-end cars, from which they made higher profits, which they used to build North American assembly plants and to develop more expensive and profitable cars to compete with those of U.S. manufacturers.

In 2012, Barack Obama boasted that “over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires.” But this cost about $900,000 per job, paid by American purchasers of vehicles and tires. And the Peterson Institute for International Economics says that this money taken from consumers reduced their spending on other retail goods, bringing the net job loss from the job-saving tire tariffs to about 2,500. And this was before China imposed retaliatory duties on U.S. chicken parts, costing the U.S. industry $1 billion in sales. Imports of low-end tires from Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere largely replaced Chinese imports.

The past is prologue. The future probably will feature many more such self-defeating government interventions in the name of compassion as protectionist America tries to cower its way to being great again.

George Will - Is anemic growth the new normal?

Is anemic growth the new normal?



By George F. Will Opinion writer July 8

ST. LOUIS

America’s economy has now slouched into the eighth year of a recovery that demonstrates how much we have defined recovery down. The idea that essentially zero interest rates are, after 7½ years, stimulating the economy “strains credulity,” says James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But last month he and other members of the Federal Reserve Board understandably felt constrained to vote unanimously to continue today’s rates for an economy that created just 38,000 jobs in May, and grew just 0.8 percent in the first quarter, after just 1.4 percent in the previous quarter.

The grim news is not that the economy continues to resist returning to normal. Rather, it is that this “current equilibrium” (Bullard’s phrase) is the new normal. If 2 percent growth is, as he says, “the most likely scenario” for the foreseeable future, the nation faces a second consecutive lost decade — one without a year of 3 percent growth.

N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economist and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, writes in the New York Times that in the past decade the growth rate of the real gross domestic product per person averaged 0.44 percent, down from the historical norm of 2 percent: At 2 percent, incomes double every 35 years; at 0.44 percent, about every 160 years.

With the recovery aging, Larry Summers, former treasury secretary, guesses that “the annual probability of recession is 25 to 30 percent.” When it arrives in a near-zero interest rate environment, the Fed’s monetary policy, normally its countercyclical weapon — it usually reduces rates at least four percentage points in a recession — will be unable to cushion the shock.

Bullard says “labor market data is giving us different” — he means more encouraging — “signals than the GDP data.” But surely the fact that the official unemployment rate is down to 4.7 percent is less important than this: The workforce participation rate has plunged, which has been only partly because of the population aging — baby boomers retiring. If labor participation were as high as when Barack Obama became president, the unemployment rate would be over 9 percent.

Besides, it is unclear how to distill the significance of traditional data for an untraditional economy. For example, 7-year old Uber, with just 6,700 employees (not counting drivers), has a public market valuation ($68 billion) $13.8 billion more than that of Ford Motor Co. (201,000 employees globally).

Certainly very low interest rates, by driving liquidity into equities and assets in search of higher yields, are exacerbating the inequality that is disturbing American politics with distributional conflicts. Homeowners, and the 10 percent of Americans who hold 81 percent of the directly and indirectly owned stocks (the stock market is 160 percent higher than its 2009 low), are prospering. Those whose wealth comes from wages — formerly, the Democratic Party’s base — are losing ground. No wonder Hillary Clinton vows to “expand” Social Security, never mind its rickety financial architecture.

The public’s perception, and perhaps the Fed’s conceit, is that the Fed “manages” the economy. “We are,” Bullard says, “our own worst enemy.” By taking credit when things go well, it acquires responsibility in the public’s mind “for everything that happens.”

Bullard says “the most disturbing number” about the economy is that for five years productivity has grown only half a percent a year. Still, he is not among those who are in a defensive crouch about immigration: “We have a great thing happening in that a lot of people want to come here and work.”

Neither does he subscribe to Robert Gordon’s hypothesis (developed in “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”) that we must abandon the unrealistic growth expectations we acquired as a result of an exceptional century (1870-1970) of transformative developments (e.g., electrification, the internal combustion engine, urban sanitation) that have no foreseeable analogues. Bullard imagines someone a millennium ago saying: Fire has been harnessed, the wheel and agriculture have been invented — we already have most of the possible growth from new technologies.

Besides, Bullard says, it takes a while for technologies to “diffuse through the economy.” And some of the diffusion — in leisure, in richer living experiences (social media; smartphones and their apps) — is not captured in GDP statistics. Perhaps that helps to explain why Obama’s job approval has reached 52 percent at a moment when she who seeks to replace him concedes that the economy is so anemic that her husband will be assigned to “revitalize” it.

Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America

Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America

By George F. Will Opinion writer July 31

Executives of Planned Parenthood’s federally subsidized meat markets — your tax dollars at work — lack the courage of their convictions. They should drop the pretense of conducting a complex moral calculus about the organs they harvest from the babies they kill.

First came the video showing a salad-nibbling, wine-sipping Planned Parenthood official explaining how “I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above” whatever organ (“heart, lung, liver”) is being harvested. Then the president of a Planned Parenthood chapter explainedthe happy side of harvesting: “For a lot of the women participating in the fetal tissue donation program, they’re having a procedure that may be a very difficult decision for them and this is a way for them to feel that something positive is coming from . . . a very difficult time.”
George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.View Archive
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“Having a procedure” — stopping the beating of a human heart — can indeed be a difficult decision for the woman involved. But it never is difficult for Planned Parenthood’s abortionists administering the “procedure.” The abortion industry’s premise is: At no point in the gestation of a human infant does this living being have a trace of personhood that must be respected. Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in the mother’s stomach.

In 1973, the Supreme Court, simultaneously frivolous and arrogant, discovered constitutional significance in the fact that the number nine is divisible by three. It decreed that the status of pre-born human life changes with pregnancy’s trimesters. (What would abortion law be if the number of months of gestation were a prime number — seven or 11?) The court followed this preposterous assertion with faux humility, insisting it could not say when life begins. Then, swerving back to breathtaking vanity, it declared when “meaningful” life begins — “viability,” when the fetus is “potentially able” to survive outside the womb.

When life begins is a scientific, not a philosophic or theological, question: Life begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with those of the ovum, forming a distinctive DNA complex that controls the new organism’s growth. This growth process continues unless a natural accident interrupts it or it is ended by the sort of deliberate violence Planned Parenthood sells.

Another video shows the craftsmanship of Planned Parenthood’s abortionists — tiny limbs and hands from dismembered babies. To the craftsmen, however, these fragments are considered mere organic stuff. People who proclaim themselves both pro-choice and appalled by the videos are flinching from the logic of their extremism.

Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, apologizes for the “tone”of her operatives’ chatter about crushing babies. But the tone flows from Planned Parenthood’s premise: Why be solemn about meat?

Even partial-birth abortion is — must be — a sacrament in the Church of “Choice.” This sect knows that its entire edifice depends on not yielding an inch on its insistence that what an abortion kills never possesses a scintilla of moral significance.

In partial-birth abortion, a near-term baby is pulled by the legs almost out of the birth canal, until the base of the skull is exposed so the abortionist can suck out its contents. During Senate debates on this procedure, three Democrats were asked: Suppose a baby’s head slips out of the birth canal — the baby is born — before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby then have a right to live? Two of the Democrats refused to answer. The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.

The nonnegotiable tenet in today’s Democratic Party catechism is not opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline or support for a $15 minimum wage. These are evanescent fevers. As the decades roll by, the single unshakable commitment is opposition to any restriction on the right to inflict violence on pre-born babies. So today there is a limitless right to kill, and distribute fragments of, babies that intrauterine medicine can increasingly treat as patients.

We are wallowing in this moral swamp because the Supreme Court accelerated the desensitization of the nation by using words and categories about abortion the way infants use knives and forks — with gusto, but sloppily. Because Planned Parenthood’s snout is deep in the federal trough, decent taxpayers find themselves complicit in the organization’s vileness. What kind of a government disdains the deepest convictions of citizens by forcing them to finance what they see in videos — Planned Parenthood operatives chattering about bloody human fragments? “Taxes,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “are what we pay for civilized society.” Today they finance barbarism.

Economics, Truly, Affects Everything

Economics, Truly, Affects Everything

BY GEORGE F. WILL

03/25/2015 05:39 PM ET

Every day the Chinese go to work, Americans get a raise:

Chinese workers, many earning each day about what Americans spend on a Starbucks latte, produce apparel, appliances and other stuff cheaply, enlarging Americans' disposable income. Americans similarly get a raise when they shop at the stores that made Sam Walton a billionaire.

The ranks of billionaires are constantly churned. Most of the persons on the original Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1982 were off the list in 2013. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, was not born until 1984. America needs more billionaires like him, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs.

With the iPod, iPhone and iPad, unique products when introduced, Jobs' Apple created monopolies. But instead of raising prices, Apple has cut them because "profits attract imitators and innovators." Which is one reason why monopolies come and go.

When John D. Rockefeller began selling kerosene in 1870, he had approximately 4% of the market. By 1890, he had 85%. Did he use this market dominance to gouge consumers?

Kerosene prices fell from 30 cents a gallon in 1869 to 6 cents in 1897. And in the process of being branded a menacing monopoly, Rockefeller's Standard Oil made gasoline so cheap that Ford found a mass market for Model T's.

Monopoly profits are social blessings when they "signal to the ambitious the wealth they can earn by entering previously unknown markets." So "when the wealth gap widens, the lifestyle gap shrinks."

Hence, "income inequality in a capitalist system is truly beautiful" because "it provides the incentive for creative people to gamble on new ideas, and it turns luxuries into common goods." Since 2000, the price of a 50-inch plasma TV has fallen from $20,000 to $550.

Henry Ford doubled employees' basic wage in 1914, supposedly to enable them to buy Fords.

Actually, he did it because in 1913 annual worker turnover was 370%. He lowered labor costs by reducing turnover and the expense of constantly training new hires.

All these thoughts are from John Tamny, a one-man antidote to economic obfuscation and mystification.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who called economics "the dismal science," never read Tamny, a Forbes editor, editor of RealClearMarkets, and now author of the cheerful, mind-opening book, "Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You About Economics."

In the early 1970s, when the Rolling Stones were coining money and Britain's top tax rate was 83%, Keith Richards, lead guitarist and social philosopher, said: "That's the same as being told to leave the country."

The Stones decamped to France, leaving Britain, Tamny notes, to collect 83% of nothing.

Americans execrate "outsourcing," which supposedly involves sending "American jobs" overseas. Well, Nike employs 40 times more manufacturing workers in Vietnam than in America, but could not afford as many American workers as it has without the efficiencies of outsourcing.

Tamny cites Enrico Moretti, a Berkeley economist, who says that when Americans buy an iPhone online, it is shipped from China and the only American who touches it is the UPS delivery person.

Is it regrettable that Americans are not doing the assembly jobs for which Chinese are paid the "latte wage"?

Actually, Americans incessantly "outsource" here at home by, for example, having Iowans grow their corn and dentists take care of their teeth, jobs at which Iowans and dentists excel and the rest of us do not.

LeBron James could be an adequate NFL tight end, but why subtract time from being a superb basketball player? The lesson, says Tamny, is that individuals — and nations — should do what they do better than others, and let others do other things.

Millions of jobs, he says, would be created if we banned computers, ATMs and tractors. The mechanization of agriculture destroyed millions of jobs performed with hoes and scythes. Was Cyrus McCormick a curse?

The best way to (in Barack Obama's 2008 words to Joe the Plumber) "spread the wealth around," is, Tamny argues, "to leave it in the hands of the wealthy." Personal consumption absorbs a small portion of their money and the remainder is not idle. It is invested by them, using the skill that earned it. Will it be more beneficially employed by the political class of a confiscatory government?

"Nothing," Tamny demonstrates, "is easier to understand than economics. It is everywhere you look."

Readers of his book will subsequently look at things differently.

The right to pass through life without encountering any disagreeable thought

Texas takes aim at the First Amendment




By George F. Will 

December 17


The Battle of Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Tex., on May 13, 1865, is called the last battle of the Civil War, but the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) might consider that judgment premature, given its conflict with the state’s Department of Transportation and Department of Motor Vehicles. This skirmish is of national interest because it implicates a burgeoning new entitlement: the right to pass through life without encountering any disagreeable thought.

Under Texas’s specialty license plate system, plates can be created by the legislature by specific enactments, or they can, for a fee, be designed by individuals, nonprofits or businesses. In the private instances, Texas is selling space for advertising. The specialty plates exhort (Be a Blood Donor), emote (I’d Rather Be Golfing), celebrate (NASCAR, many universities) and commemorate (Buffalo Soldiers, Korea Veteran).

The Texas SCV’s design caused a commotion because the organization’s logo includes the Confederate battle flag. The Texas committee that approves specialty plates approved the SCV plate before it disapproved it because an official considered the plate “controversial.” The Texas Transportation Code says that the state may refuse to create a plate “if the design might be offensive to any member of the public.” Yes, any .

A district court rejected the SCV’s contention that this decision was unconstitutional, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that specialty plates are private speech, so the state had violated the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint discrimination against the SCV.

Texas is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably in vain. The SCV’s brief notes that “every circuit to address a specialty plate program enabling private parties to submit their own specialty plate designs has held that the plates constitute private speech, the First Amendment applies, and regulation has to be viewpoint neutral.”

But there is, believe it or not, a body of license plate law. In 1977, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a Jehovah’s Witness in New Hampshire to edit out, with tape or metal shears or otherwise, that state’s license plate slogan “Live Free or Die.” The plaintiff held that “life is more precious than freedom” and that the state could not compel him to “foster” religious or political “concepts” with which he disagreed.

Some language that is put on plates by legislative action — e.g., Idaho’s “Famous Potatoes” — is government speaking its mind and need not be neutral. In Illinois, where specialty plates require a specific legislative enactment, when a pro-life group sought a “Choose Life” plate, the state decided to exclude the subject of abortion, pro and con, so the denial was viewpoint-neutral.

Texas, however, denied the SCV plate explicitly because it, with its flag, was “offensive,” which is an impermissible reason for denying speech. The hearing that forbade the SCV plate approved a Buffalo Soldiers plate even though some Native Americans had said they were offended by this reference to the 19th-century African American military units that participated in battles against Native Americans. In 2011, however, the Supreme Court held:

“The Constitution does not permit the government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer. Rather . . . the burden normally falls upon the viewer to avoid further bombardment of [his] sensibilities simply by averting [his] eyes.”

The new entitlement aims to spare the people this burden. At many American colleges and universities, where thinking goes to hibernate, freedom of expression is restricted for the purpose of sparing the delicate sensibilities of the most exquisitely sensitive people on the campuses. The First Amendment is construed to stipulate that there shall be no abridgement of free speech — unless the speech annoys, saddens, angers, dismays or otherwise discombobulates the emotional equilibrium or intellectual serenity of any listener.

Inevitably, this entitlement is expanded to include the right to assume a fetal position and be absolved of burdens if news of some event in the wider world distresses some students. So, Columbia University Law School recently allowed students to postpone final exams if these frail flowers felt that their performance would be “impaired” because they had been traumatized by the fact that grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and New York did not indict police officers in cases involving Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Columbia evidently is training lawyers for a United States so tranquil it will not need any lawyers. Tranquil because silent.