Americans don’t require their government to secure them investment. The world lines up to invest in U.S. genius not because presidents or Commerce Departments enter deals with other countries, but because the world’s savers view the U.S. as one of the ultimate investment returns.
It’s worth thinking about considering President Trump’s EU trade deal announced over the weekend. To lament the 15 percent tax on market goods bound for the U.S. is to shoot fish. Time won’t be wasted on Trump taxing U.S. production, which is what a tariff is: ALL production is demand, which means tariffs tax production all the while raising the cost of increasing production through greater amounts of work divided. So much more could be said, and will be said if the tariffs are allowed to stand by courts.
Instead, it’s better to focus on Trump’s alleged negotiation of a deal whereby the “EU” has apparently agreed to buy $750 billion of energy products from the U.S., plus invest another $600 billion in the U.S. Except that growing countries require neither forced purchases nor forced investment. The growth implies copious amounts of both.
The happy truth has always been that the world’s producers have long lined up to produce for the American people. Talk about an investment! For centuries the world has viewed American production as so muscular as to rate enormous amounts of foreign production in return. The ultimate foreign investment is export.
That’s because what’s done for us by others doesn’t put us out of work any more than a tractor, fertilizer, car, computer, or smartphone renders us unemployed. That which does for us, whether human or technological, amplifies our skills.
When the rest of the world is doing it for us, we have the chance to specialize to an even greater degree. Translated, production by others lifts those produced for. Yes, it vivifies their genius. And as should be obvious from the latter, whatever inputs lift our skills act as a magnet for investment.
Which helps to explain the happy fact that the U.S. has never required force or central planners from the GOP to bring in investment. No need whatsoever. Our productivity was the ultimate lure. Translated, no affirmative action needed care of the alleged “meritocrats” inside the GOP.
Since the U.S. has long been Hong Kong in the tariff sense, it had enormous incomings in the market good sense that were an effect of the productivity that invariably results from openness to foreign plenty. Exports are an investment in the productivity of a country that beget more investment.
Until now? President Trump and his merry collection of “free market” advisors are slapping backs for taxing the imports that by their very description, tax investment.
It’s just a comment that in addition to shrinking the U.S. with tariffs, President Trump actions are embarrassing us. The very idea that we need to demand investment is so affirmative action, and yes, left wing.
