The reaction to Trump’s deal to keep 1,100 Carrier jobs in Indiana has ranged from outrage to adoration. There are so many layers to this Shakespearean drama that all points of views have some level of credence. I’m torn between the positive and negative aspects of this deal. If you’ve read Bastiat’s The Law and Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, you understand the fallacies involved when government interferes in the free market. Politicians and their fanboys always concentrate on the seen aspects of government intervention, but purposely ignore the unseen consequences.

First, I wholeheartedly agree with Scott Adams’ assessment of Trump’s move as a brilliant, visible, memorable, newsworthy ploy to sway public opinion and sending a message to corporate America that he means business. Trump beat Carrier like a rented mule during the entire presidential campaign for announcing they were closing their plant in Indiana and moving the jobs to a new plant in Mexico. The publicity was so bad, I ended up getting a substantial rebate when I had a Carrier air conditioner installed in the Spring.

I’ve seen Trump worshipers trying to show what a fantastic economic deal this was for Indiana and the country. They are only looking at the scenario of staying versus leaving. The other scenario is what exists today versus what will exist tomorrow. Those 1,100 jobs already exist in Indiana. They are already paying taxes and spending money in Indiana. The taxpayers of Indiana currently have no obligation to Carrier or the employees of Carrier. With this new “fantastic” deal, the employees of Carrier are still employed, but now the the taxpayers of Indiana now have a $7 million obligation to Carrier.

This isn’t a zero sum game. The $7 million is taken from the pockets of taxpayers and will not be spent in the greater economy of Indiana. This deal is absolutely a net loss for Indiana versus where they were before the deal. The people of this country are hypocritical when it comes to keeping jobs in the U.S. They want cheap electronics, gadgets, appliances and air conditioners. Therefore, they have been buying cheap foreign made products by the trillions for the last couple decades.

Carrier was moving to Mexico for the low labor and regulatory costs. This would have allowed them to sell the air conditioners made in Mexico at a lower price than if they are made in Indiana. Therefore, the consumers of these products would have spent less money on the air conditioners, leaving excess funds to spend on other products. The purchasers of Carrier air conditioners are not benefiting from this deal. (Read more from “Carrier and the Slippery Slope” HERE)

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For the latest evidence of the price the American people have paid for a feckless Republican Congress, look no further than the impunity with which the Obama administration is acting in a direct rebuke to the American people on one of the core national security concerns of our time.

Or was one of the central themes of the presidential election that Barack Obama’s party just lost not the need to assert American sovereignty and our national interest first by at least pausing immigration from jihadist hotspots?

Alas, it is only fitting that the swan song of this administration reads as follows: “Bring us your tired, your poor, your unvetted refugees.”

The news to which I am referring comes from a Fox report that the U.S. State Department has classified details on a deal the Obama administration cut with Australia resulting in the resettlement of approximately 2,500 refugees to the U.S. from countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other Islamic supremacist-majority nations — refugees rejected by the Australians themselves.

There is the usual outrage around this deal, including the fact that the president has never articulated why it is in America’s national interest to import refugees from Islamic supremacist nations at a time when Islamic supremacists tell us they wish to infiltrate by embedding among such peoples. And what about the fact that our FBI director said we were incapable of vetting such refugees? Likewise, the Obama administration has remained mum rather than demanding that other Islamic nations take responsibility for absorbing such refugees given similarity in culture, the relative logistical ease with which such actions could be taken, financial wherewithal. Fundamentally, the Obama administration continues to show compassion for non-Americans over and above those who elected him.

A theme I raised in a recent piece in opposition to the choice of Senate Foreign Relations Cmte Chair Bob Corker, R-Tenn. (F, 45%) for secretary of state in President-elect Trump’s administration recurs in this story well, further reflecting the damage Sen. Corker has wrought and why he ought not to reach Foggy Bottom.

In a letter on the matter addressed to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. (D, 66%) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. (D, 64%) wrote “This situation is concerning for many reasons,” continuing “your departments negotiated an international agreement regarding refugees without consulting or notifying Congress.”

The very Senate treaty ratification power that readers will recall Sen. Corker turned on its head in the Iran Deal, essentially conceding the Senate’s check on the president’s seminal disastrous piece of foreign policy, is what the president relied on to negotiate this secret agreement. This follows the president’s neglect of the senate with respect to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

What fear should a president have when Congress fails to adequately use its oversight powers, powers of the purse, advice and consent and impeachment powers in the face of a rampantly lawless agenda?

A President Donald Trump is going to have to clean up President Obama’s numerous messes, and at every turn face a Democratic minority that unlike Republicans in the Obama years will have no fear of using every parliamentary and political trick and maneuver to thwart policy they do not like and corrupt that which they cannot stop.

But he is also going to have to deal with a Republican Congress that has shown itself to be lacking in spine for the last eight years.

The reassertion of Congressional power during the Trump years will certainly be a welcome thing.

Let us hope however that it is not so one-sided as to allow President Obama’s most disastrous actions to substantially survive. (For more from the author of “From Refugees to the Iran Deal: Will Congress Get Its Act Together Under President Trump?” please click HERE)

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Since as a winning candidate Donald Trump made a powerful symbol of the impending 1,000 lost jobs at Carrier Air Conditioning, it was inevitable that he would intervene in that business. It would have been politically foolish not to — and as the many savvy professionals whom he crushed in 2016 now should realize, Trump is nobody’s fool. So we learned this week that he has indeed used the many levers at an incoming president’s disposal to strong-arm/sweet-talk the company into saving those jobs for Americans, and denying them to Mexicans.

My first book was on the merits of the free market and free trade, but when I watched the footage of Carrier workers learning last year that their jobs were on the chopping block, I got teary-eyed myself and found my heart saying (despite my head) that Trump should indeed violate economic logic and engage in big government meddling, to “do something” for those workers — as Ronald Reagan once intervened against his principles to use a tariff to “save” Harley-Davidson from Japanese competitors.

Protectionism: Patriotic But Self-Defeating

There’s a strong rational case against protectionism — especially of the kind Trump engaged in here. The most benign form of protectionism, as free market economist Wilhelm Röpke explained, is a simple tariff. A small or medium tariff indeed distorts the market and imposes some inefficiency, but not necessarily more than any other form of tax. If imposed with advance notice and kept at predictable levels, businessmen and investors can simply figure it in to the cost of doing business — as they currently do the cost of environmental regulations.

What Trump did with Carrier is an order of magnitude worse: He singled out a particular company, and got the federal government down into the nuts and bolts of how it does business, threatening its corporate parent with lost federal contracts unless it made a specific decision — namely, avoid opening a factory in Mexico, and keep one open in the U.S. That is more than “leveling the playing field” against supposedly unfair foreign competition. It is picking winners and losers, like a umpire who has been bribed.

If the president gets in the business of directly trying to decide how every major manufacturing company in America makes such decisions, he is abandoning the free market altogether. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he is making himself effectively a board member of each of those companies. That starts a vicious cycle. Soon companies catch on that by threatening to move their factories abroad, they can provoke a presidential reaction — that pretty soon, the feds will move in and start offering tax breaks and other incentives, maybe extra federal contracts if they stay on American soil. Think of the squalid hog-slopping that happens when cities bid for the Olympics, or the bidding wars provoked by movie producers hungry for subsidies, and sports franchises who want new stadiums at taxpayer expense.

Making America Like the Post Office or Amtrak

All of this political meddling is profoundly wasteful, as the rotting hulks of Olympic complexes (and massive resulting deficits) testify all around the world. Such crony capitalism tends to benefit not productive and innovative companies, but those which are skilled at lobbying and greasing politicians’ palms. The more any business relies on federal help, the closer it becomes not to Southwest Airlines or Fedex, but to Amtrak and the Post Office. Is that really the way to make our companies profitable and high-paying? One of the most compelling reasons why the British voted for Brexit was to escape the micromanagement of the economy imposed by the wannabe federal government of the European Union.

Add up all those objections to protectionism, and then factor in how it raises the prices of ordinary goods for ordinary consumers, and you see why conservatives generally oppose it.

And yet, we need to look out for hard-pressed ordinary workers — the kind of people whose businesses don’t get bailed out by the U.S. federal government, as enormous Wall Street banks were after their reckless run of irresponsible investments in shaky mortgages, which crashed in 2008. Steve Bannon is right to observe that this bailout — conducted almost at gunpoint, under the threat of a “Great Depression” — was a corrupt transfer of wealth from the little guy to the “1 percenters,” which violated every tenet of free market economics and simple justice.

It is healthy that we feel some solidarity with blue collar workers simply because they’re fellow Americans — whose ancestors fought in our wars, and who still disproportionately enlist in our country’s armed services. (Long gone are the days when young men from elite schools routinely signed up for at least four years — though some Southerners still do.) The impulse to choose to “buy American” stems from the virtue of patriotism.

A Real Pro-Worker Agenda

We can be patriotic but smart. We can look out for U.S. workers without turning them into postal workers. (My dad was a mailman; as he told it, when two windows are open in a post office with a long line waiting, that means five workers sit idle, flipping through copies of Playboy they’ve stolen from the mail.) Here is a list of measures which a President Trump could take instead of Putin-style palm-greasing and browbeating to interfere with companies’ rational economic decisions. These steps would be populist in the positive sense, since they benefit the people.

Secure our country’s borders and workplaces by building a wall and making E-Verify mandatory for every business with more than five workers. Americans shouldn’t have to compete with unregulated, exploited laborers who can be threatened with deportation by their employers.

Drastically cut low-skill legal immigration, and the resettlement of refugees from distant countries. Some jobs are simply doomed to migrate overseas. But there’s no reason to fill the entry-level and low-skill jobs that can’t be outsourced with recent arrivals from other countries. Fixing immigration by itself would reduce most of the pressure on less-skilled American workers’ wages.

Cut our corporate tax rates, which are currently among the highest in the world. Stop granting tax breaks to individual companies (like Carrier) and grant them to … every company doing business in the U.S.

Greatly increase the per-child tax deduction for families, who are struggling under the regressive Social Security tax.

Promote school choice not by creating vouchers, which would give federal bureaucrats control over even private, Christian schools. Instead, create large and refundable tax credits which parents could use for tuition at any school — including home schools.

In one “grand bargain” piece of legislation, dismantle the labyrinth of regulations imposed after 2008 on banks to prevent them from failing, and use anti-trust laws to break up enormous banks that can threaten the whole economy with their reckless investments. Any bank that’s “too big to fail” is too big to exist — and the proliferation of such banks offers a perfect excuse for massive government meddling in that sector of the economy.

Reverse Richard Nixon’s massive blunder, and as George Gilder recommends, recouple U.S. currency to the price of gold. America’s post-war boom took place on a modified gold standard, and 1970s stagflation resulted when we abandoned it. Some link to an external commodity in limited supply in the real world would stop the Federal Reserve from massively inflating the money supply every time an incumbent president wanted to win an election — and sparking a mindless “boom” of wasteful investments in pointless dotcom startups and dodgy real estate boondoggles.

Each of these ideas is Constitutional, populist and economically sound. A Trump administration could stick up for blue-collar workers and middle-class families without descending intp cronyism and corporatism. It just takes imagination and political courage. (For more from the author of “What Donald Trump Could Really Do for America’s Working Class” please click HERE)

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