The Ferguson Forum

Once Again, Feminists Silence Pro-Life Women

It’s 2017 and women are still being silenced.

The twist is that it’s now by other women.

The Women’s March on Washington, scheduled to occur the day after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, had listed a pro-life group, New Wave Feminists, as a partner organization. After The Atlantic highlighted the group’s participation as a partner in the march, the Women’s March took the group off the list, saying its inclusion had been an “error.”

“The protest is pro-choice and that has been our stance from Day One,” the Women’s March said in a statement. “We want to assure all of our partners, as well as our participants, that we are pro-choice as clearly stated in our Unity Principles. We look forward to marching on behalf of individuals who share the view that women deserve the right to make their own reproductive choices.”

Never mind that the event’s organizers had told The Daily Signal’s Kelsey Harkness in December that pro-lifers were welcome to participate in the Women’s March. “The message is not whether a person is pro-life or pro-choice,” said march organizer Tamika Mallory at the time.

It wasn’t entirely surprising they caved. Since Mallory spoke to The Daily Signal, Planned Parenthood has become a partner. And after The Atlantic published its article about the New Wave Feminists’ inclusion, liberal feminists tweeted their dismay:

The exact mission of the Women’s March, which started with Hawaii grandmother Teresa Shook’s Facebook comment on election night that “I think we should march,” has been somewhat … nebulous from its inception.

“What sparked the need for this movement was the rhetoric of the campaign was so demeaning to women,” Shook told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview. “I just felt women needed to stand up and say, ‘Here we are, hear our voice, we’re strong, we’re empowered, and we’re not going away.'”

But regardless of the mission that the event organizers finally settled upon—(assuming they did settle on one—the Women’s March is now in trouble with liberal feminists for removing a statement on rights for sex workers)—it shouldn’t be called the Women’s March if it isn’t meant to be inclusive for all women.

As much as the left (and some of their cheerleaders in the media) love to portray women as a unified bloc of pink-wearing Planned Parenthood cheerleaders who cherish no political right as much as they do the right to abortion, the political reality is far more complicated.

Four out of 10 women in America think abortion should be “illegal in all/most cases,” according to a poll released last year by the Pew Research Center. And two-thirds of women voters support legislation that would ban abortions after 20 weeks, except if the mother’s life is in danger or in cases of rape and incest, according to a November poll commissioned by the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization.

In other words, the pro-choice position of the “Women’s March” is excluding a lot of American women.

And unfortunately, that’s all too common. In our political discourse, it’s regularly assumed that all women agree with the Lena Dunhams of the world.

It doesn’t matter how many women passionately believe that both female and male unborn children deserve the right to life, despite being small and dependent. It doesn’t matter how many women think all women deserve something better than the kind of treatment delivered by Dr. Kermit Gosnell, under whose care a woman undergoing a second-trimester abortion died.

It doesn’t matter how many women think that what can best help a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy is financial support and personal care, the kind delivered by pregnancy centers across the country—not a push that she end the life of her child.

Or at least that doesn’t matter to the liberal feminists who constantly demand pro-life women be excluded.

It’s time the left accept that women have a diversity of views on many issues, including on abortion.

And if liberal feminists are sincere about women’s rights, they’ll realize that means that all women, not just those they agree with, deserve a seat at the table (or a place in the march) to represent their views.

Commentary by Katrina Trinko. Katrina Trinko is managing editor of The Daily Signal and a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors.

Originally published at http://dailysignal.com/2017/01/17/once-again-feminists-silence-pro-life-women/

Soros says Trump will fail and market's dream will end

Business magnate George Soros arrives to speak at the Open Russia Club in London, Britain June 20, 2016. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor/File Photo

By Jennifer Ablan and Trevor Hunnicutt

(Reuters) - The billionaire investor George Soros said on Thursday that global markets will falter given the uncertainty of incoming U.S. President Donald Trump's policies.

"Right now uncertainty is at the peak," Soros told Bloomberg News at his annual media dinner held at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "I don't think the markets are going to do very well."

Stocks in the United States surged after Trump's Nov. 8 election victory. Trump takes office on Friday.

"Markets see Trump dismantling regulations and reducing taxes, and that has been the dream," said Soros. "The dream has come true."

But Trump has called for border taxes and withdrawing from his predecessor's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, among other policies that have unclear ramifications for U.S. growth, Soros said.

"It's impossible to predict exactly how Trump is going to act," he said.

Soros, who founded Soros Fund Management LLC and now is chairman of the New York-based firm, was a large contributor to the Super PAC fund-raising group backing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and had donated to other groups supporting Democrats.

Overall, Soros said about the president-elect: "I personally am convinced that he is going to fail. Not because of people like me who would like him to fail. But because his ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory and the contradictions are actually already embodied by his advisers ... and his cabinet."

Turning to the United Kingdom, Soros said it is unlikely that Prime Minister Theresa May will "remain in power" given divisions within her government.

May on Tuesday laid out plans for Britain to negotiate its exit from the European Union. Soros said that process will be long and that "a bitter divorce" will hurt both sides.

Soros famously made huge profits in 1992 betting against the British pound as it crashed below the preset level and had to be withdrawn from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

China has an interest in European unity because of the bloc's importance as an export market, Soros said.

He said President Xi Jinping, who on Tuesday made a case for China's leadership in Davos, can steer his country to either a more open society or a more closed society, while nudging it to a more sustainable economic growth model.

"Trump will do more to make China acceptable as a leading member of the international community than the Chinese could do by themselves," Soros said.

(Reporting by Jennifer Ablan and Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Alan Crosby)

Betsy DeVos Hearing Highlights the Need for Less Government Control in Education

Photo Credit: Flickr, light_seeker, CC by 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

On Tuesday night, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a confirmation hearing for Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos.

Devos, a longtime proponent of school choice, also fielded questions about her positions on higher education and preschool.

The hearing turned into a vibrant debate among the senators about the merits of education choice, what the federal government can and should do to advance choice, the state of student loans and grants, and the efficacy of preschool.

School Choice

In her opening remarks, DeVos posed an important question: “Why,” she asked, “in 2017, are we still questioning parents’ ability to exercise school choice?”

Indeed, research in the field of education choice has demonstrated that parents are savvy consumers of education services, schools, and products, and that access to school choice shifts parents “from the margins to the center of their children’s academic development.”

Moreover, University of Arkansas researchers have written that school choice moves parents “from a marginal role as passive recipients of school assignments to active participants in the school selection process in very practical ways.”

This more active role yields impressive benefits for students. Research has shown that school choice improves academic outcomes for participants and for children in nearby public schools, leads to more satisfied parents, and saves money for taxpayers.

Reviewing research on the topic, researcher Greg Forster found that, of all random assignment evaluations conducted to date, 14 out of 18 show that choice improves academic outcomes for students. Moreover, 31 of 33 empirical studies find that school choice improves academic outcomes in public schools.

Forster also found that 25 of 28 empirical studies on the fiscal impact of school choice find school choice saves money.

The Senate hearing also turned to a discussion about school choice options such as vouchers, tuition tax credit scholarships, and charter schools, and what such options mean for traditional public schools.

The essence of the debate was about the definition of “public” education. DeVos suggested that policymakers should be less focused on upholding specific systems and arrangements for delivering education.

Moving away from institution-based funding to student-based funding is smart policy at every level of education.

As economist Milton Friedman argued, just because we publicly finance education does not mean education has to be delivered through government schools. Friedman suggested separating the funding of education from the delivery of education services—an arrangement that is at the heart of school choice.

‘Free’ College

The hearing also turned to policies pertaining to higher education reform and college costs. When asked whether she would support “free” college, DeVos responded with the basic fact that “nothing in life is free.”

Indeed, “free” college, and generous government subsidies in general, shift the burden of paying for college away from students—who are the direct beneficiaries of attending college—and onto the taxpayers, many of whom do not hold college degrees themselves and will never attend college.

Such arrangements are an inequitable way to think about higher education financing and will only exacerbate the problem of rising college tuition costs.

Instead of pouring more and more money into federal student aid, the new administration, along with Congress, should eliminate the PLUS loan program to make way for better private alternatives.

They should also reform the accreditation system to allow innovative higher education options to enter the market, and eliminate generous public sector loan forgiveness policies that privilege government work over private sector employment.

Government-Run Preschool

Finally, the hearing also allowed for an extended discussion about the merits of government-run preschool, including the federal Head Start program.

As a growing body of empirical evidence has suggested, preschool provides few lasting benefits, and large-scale federal preschool efforts are particularly ineffective at improving outcomes for low-income children.

An evaluation of Head Start—the largest federal preschool program—by the Department of Health and Human Services (which administers the $9 billion annual program) found that Head Start had “little to no effect on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes of participating children.”

Moreover, evidence from Quebec and Tennessee—two areas with large, taxpayer-funded universal preschool programs—found the programs may worsen the behavioral and emotional outcomes of children. As my colleague Salim Furth and I wrote recently:

Proponents of universal government-subsidized preschool have to grapple with the fact that previous universal programs have failed and had negative social impacts on children …
Government subsidies for child care introduce a large distortion into the market and must be funded by higher tax rates. Particularly in the absence of compelling evidence that subsidized preschool provides an important public good, the subsidies should be reduced, not increased.

Additional federal subsidies for early childhood education would produce negative effects, such as crowding out private providers from the preschool market, which would ultimately limit options for families.

Policy Priorities

As DeVos, the incoming Trump administration, and Congress prepare to tackle various education-related issues in the coming year, they should prioritize the following to-do list (full explanation of each proposal here):

Support reauthorization and expansion of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Create education savings accounts for children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools.

Allow states to make their Title I dollars portable, following children to schools and education providers of choice.

Allow K-12 expenses to be eligible for 529 college savings accounts.

Enable states to fully opt out of the programs that fall under the Every Student Succeeds Act through the A-PLUS (Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success) proposal.

Ease the cost of college by making space for private lending.

Congress should take this opportunity to advance education choice as appropriate. It should work to restore state and local control of education through the A-PLUS proposal and of higher education through the HERO (Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act) proposal.

Taking those steps would limit federal intervention in education and would create more support for student-centered policies across the country.

Commentary by Lindsey Burke, via The Daily Signal

Lindsey M. Burke researches and writes on federal and state education issues as the Will Skillman fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Trump Supporters Are Facing Market Discrimination, and that's Ok

Supporters of president-elect Donald Trump are excited for Inauguration Day. As a result, listings on the peer-to-peer homestay app Airbnb are expected to soar in response to demand. With hotel prices in the D.C. area nearly doubling, Airbnb offers an alternative both for inaugural attendees looking to save a few bucks, and hosts looking to make a few bucks. But, not everyone is comfortable with renting out their home to Trump enthusiasts.
And that’s okay.

Not Everyone Likes Trump Supporters

Some are saying that this is a form of discrimination. Well, yeah.
It’s no secret that this presidential campaign has inflamed tensions among ethnic groups, religious groups, and, of course, political groups. That’s true whether it be Trump’s appeal to perceived Islamophobic sentiments throughout his campaign or the mainstream media’s exacerbation of narratives surrounding misogyny and racism. Whether you believe these claims to be true or false, there’s no doubt that many people are afraid and disgusted by the idea of a Trump supporter.
Knowing this, it’s no surprise that many landlords in the D.C. area are dissuaded from opening up their homes to people they believe, or have been told, are violent, woman-hating xenophobes. Some are saying that this is a form of discrimination. Well, yeah.

My question is: what’s wrong with that?

Freedom of association is a cornerstone of general commerce, but more specifically Airbnb. The beauty of the service is that you’re not simply trading cash for a cot and bathroom. The interpersonal relationships contribute to the unique experience that only Airbnb can offer. Why would you threaten that by whining about discrimination?

Ask yourself, do you really want someone who is terrified or hostile to Trump supporters to be forced to allow them into their home? Or at least be forced to hide their concerns in order to stay in business? I’d say no. Let people voice their prejudices. Allow interaction to be voluntarily desired, not coercively mandated by moral busybodies who believe that government-forced egalitarianism will make us all happy.

The Benefits of Discrimination

Let Airbnb landlord's discriminate as they please. And, in turn, let renters discriminate as they please. Another FEE contributor, Jeffrey Tucker, had an experience with a bigoted user on the platform. He explained in an article that when the landlord displayed discriminatory concerns over immigrants, he exerted his own right to discriminate as a consumer. He was appreciative of the honesty of the landlords character, and rationally sought out a more welcoming host.

The authoritarian response would be to enforce antidiscrimination policies, mandating not only that the landlord host Jeffrey, but also forcing Jeffrey to associate with someone he otherwise would not have. This creates an unbeneficial relationship between service provider and consumer.

It also puts the consumer in danger of conflict or a poor customer experience because the entire transaction is based on false pretenses. Had both parties simply been free to voluntarily express their desire to engage in trade or not, they would have likely both benefited as a result.

What about Grounds of Race?

Let’s make the case a bit harder. Let’s say the hosts are black, and a white male from Michigan – responsible for turning the race for Trump – wants a room for two days around inauguration day. And to add insult to injury, he’s wearing a Make America Great Again hat on his profile pic. *GASPS*
If people don’t want to host Trump supporters in their homes, that’s their right.
Here you have a case that a normie – certainly if the races were reversed – might regard as a clear case of racial discrimination. You can argue it either way, of course. But by deciding that the failure to transact is rooted in racial bias, the regulators have presumed to read minds, which itself is a dangerous habit in a free society.

I would say of this case, just like the former example, that the owner’s freedom to accept or decline anyone for any reason, including race, politics, gender, religion, and so on, should be honored. The grounds on which they discriminate shouldn’t matter in the context of that freedom. Ownership and the discretionary rights that extend from it are inviolable, even sacred.

Equal Treatment

It’s natural for us to favor antidiscrimination laws. Our emotional altruism pushes us to want everyone to be treated equally. But the truth is that the best thing you could do to protect people from unfair treatment and intolerance is to allow for discriminatory transparency.

If people don’t want to host Trump supporters in their homes, that’s their right. If a Trump supporter doesn’t want to stay in the home of someone who isn’t welcoming to them, that’s their right. People want the ability to choose and should have the freedom to act on that ability.

You may not like the choices some people make, and you may not agree with their rationale behind their choice. It’s called tolerance. That’s the sacrifice we must make for principled individualism. We have to abandon this notion that social and market discrimination automatically equates to oppression. Not only is that assumption untrue, it’s endangering the very people you profess to protect.

TJ Brown

Taleed J. Brown is a content intern at FEE and hosts the popular YouTube channel "That Guy T".

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Oreo Is Leaving for Mexico and Trumpism Is to Blame

Presidential front-runner Donald Trump vows that he will "never eat another Oreo again" to protest the transfer of 600 cookie-making jobs from Chicago to Mexico. And Trump is 100% correct when he condemns the factory’s exodus: "It’s unfair to us."

But the villains who have destroyed the jobs of American workers are Congress and the Department of Agriculture, not Nabisco and free trade. It is the very protectionist policies The Donald advocates to help American industry "win" again that caused the Oreo job losses he decries.

Federal policy has long kept the U.S. price of sugar at double or triple that found in the world market. Food manufacturers such as Nabisco are hostage to a Byzantine combination of price supports and arbitrary import restrictions that make producing candy and other sweets far more expensive here than in Canada or Mexico.

Federal sugar policy costs consumers $3 billion a year in a failed effort to save the jobs of sugar growers even as the number of such farmers has declined by almost 50% in recent decades.

That's bad enough, but sugar policy is one of Uncle Sam’s most successful job destroyers. The Commerce Department estimated a decade ago that "for each one sugar growing and harvesting job saved through high U.S. sugar prices, nearly three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost." Since 1997, sugar policy has zapped more than 120,000 jobs in food manufacturing, according to a study by Agralytica, an economic consulting firm. More than 10 jobs have been lost in manufacturing for every remaining sugar grower in the United States.

Our Trumpian sugar policy has been an obvious failure since the 1980s. Fifteen years ago, there was a brief uproar when Brach's Confections announced it would close its Chicago factory and move much of the production to Mexico. In 2002, Life Savers closed its Michigan factory and moved to Canada. Hershey's has also closed U.S. facilities and moved jobs abroad. Sugar prices were the culprit in each case.

Why would the feds continue a protection policy crushing American manufacturing?Campaign contributions. The sugar lobby showers Congress with money, including almost $50 million in campaign contributions and lobbying between 2008 and 2013 alone. In return, congressmen have licensed sugar growers to pilfer consumers at grocery checkouts and rob hardworking Americans of their jobs.

Our failed sugar policy illustrates why politicians cannot make trade more fair by making it less free. The economic arguments offered for sugar protectionism, like most trade barriers, are merely camouflage for political plunder. Every time Trump tries to save an American job through protectionism, he will make some Americans poorer at the same time that he puts even more jobs at risk.

This op-ed was first published in USA Today.

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Catastrophic Results of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1929-30

In the year 1929, as America slides into recession, a Republican senator, avowed patriot, Mormon “prophet” and businessman named Reed Smoot decides that he wants to do something about saving the country’s jobs.

They are being lost, insists Senator Smoot, because too many countries are selling too many goods into the United States and undermining the lives of honest, hard-working, ordinary folk.

It would take decades for some of these policies to be unwound.

Fortunately, the senator has a solution. Higher tariffs and duties, he promises, will protect those jobs. And as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he’s in a position to do something about it.

Working with Congressman Willis C Hawley, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he devises the Tariff Act, which becomes law, after months of horse-trading, in June 1930.

Hailed by its co-sponsor Hawley as the precursor to “a renewed era of prosperity”, the Act hikes tariffs on the more than 20,000 dutiable goods to an average of 59.1 per cent. Duties on some individual items are quadrupled.

Given Donald Trump’s campaign speeches, I’m guessing he has little knowledge of Smoot-Hawley. Yet his campaign promises – and his actions since he became President-elect – position him very much as Senator Smoot’s heir.

Even before he’s got his feet under the desk in the Oval Office, he has killed off the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“a terrible deal”) that had just been agreed by 12 Pacific Rim countries, and has for good measure condemned the 22-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada, US and Mexico, on the grounds that it’s costing American jobs.

In short, the 45th president sounds very much like a protectionist – an impression underlined a few days ago when he warned that if any US firms moved production abroad then tried to sell those products back home, he’d slap on a 35 per cent tariff. (Never mind, as many an expert has pointed out, that this could run into all kinds of problems under international law, not to mention America’s own constitution.)

But what exactly was Smoot-Hawley? Its stated purpose sounds eerily similar to the goals that Trump has espoused. It was, said its title, “an Act to provide revenue, to regulate commerce with foreign countries, to encourage the industries of the United States, to protect American labor, and for other purposes…”

Senator Smoot, however, had his own motives.

The Life of Smoot

Few who knew anything about the subject were enthusiastic about Smoot’s ideas.

A xenophobe who lived in the United States all his life, apart from 10 months spent in Liverpool as a Mormon missionary, Smoot had a self-imposed mission to keep his nation clean of insidious foreign influences – such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

An astute businessman with interests in banking, mining, construction and agricultural goods (particularly sugar and wool, which were important industries in Utah), he was preoccupied with putting his name on an enduring piece of legislation.

And he was also an amateur economist who firmly believed that the recession that was then under way – generally agreed to have been triggered and by the 1929 Wall Street Crash – was the result of the volume of goods for sale exceeding the capacity of Americans to buy them. Hence prices were falling.

At the time, this doctrine was known variously as “overproduction” or “underconsumption”. The solution, Smoot said, was to reduce the volume of goods on the market and get things back in balance – and for him, that meant pricing foreign products out of the American market.

There was also a part of the Utah senator that seemed to see tariff barriers as a form of retribution for the bloodshed of the First World War. “The world,” he wrote, “is paying for its ruthless destruction of life and property and for its failure to adjust purchasing power to productive capacity during the industrial revolution of the decade following the war.”

Apart from Republican politicians, who spotted votes in protectionism, few who knew anything about the subject were enthusiastic about Smoot’s ideas.

Please Don't

In fact, more than 1,000 American economists wrote to President Herbert Hoover, pleading with him not to sign the bill into existence. Despite this, and despite his own misgivings – he’d once damned the bill as “vicious, extortionate and obnoxious” – Hoover did.

The results were almost immediate. As global trade dried up, much of the world’s shipping fleet was mothballed and orders for new ships cancelled. Other major industries were affected – steel production, fishing, farming and manufacturing of all kinds.

And predictably, America’s trading partners reacted in kind.

An outraged Canada slammed tariffs on goods that accounted for 30 per cent of American exports. France, Germany and the British Empire followed suit, either turning to alternative markets or developing substitute manufacturing that would replace goods previously acquired from America – or elsewhere, since many other countries were erecting wall-of-death tariffs.

It would take decades for some of these policies to be unwound.

Although historical economists still differ about the extent of the damage caused by Smoot-Hawley, nobody doubts that it dealt a serious blow to the global economy at a vulnerable time – or that it deepened and lengthened the Depression, both inside and outside the United States.

The incoming president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said Smoot-Hawley “compelled the world to build tariff fences so high that world trade is decreasing to vanishing point”.

Between 1929 and 1933, US imports collapsed by 66 per cent. Exports plummeted by 61 per cent. Total global trade fell by a similar amount.

As the Depression worsened, the deflating US economy was hit ever harder by the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. Because the tariffs were fixed, the dutiable percentage of products grew as their value collapsed. The less trade there was, the more difficult it became.

Rather than the promised new era of prosperity, Smoot-Hawley had helped bring about an era of misery. Between 1929 and 1933, America’s wealth nearly halved – and the unemployment rate more than tripled from eight per cent to 25 per cent.

The tragedy was that the Act was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. America had actually been in surplus on its trade account, right across the board. Although food exports had been falling and were in deficit, manufactured exports more than compensated for the decline.

And while it was true that imports of foreign manufactures were indeed rising before Smoot-Hawley, economist Jakob B Madsen pointed out in a 2002 study that exports were rising even faster.

Rather like Donald Trump, Reed Smoot wasn’t a man to admit he might be wrong. As one biographer wrote: “There is no evidence that any apparent fact, any argument, any introspection even faintly disturbed him.”

“The Great Protectionist”, as author James B Allen once described him, lost office in 1932. Till his dying day, the only problem he would admit to with his tariffs was that they might not have been set quite high enough.

This piece ran on Cap-X

Selwyn Parker

Selwyn Parker is a journalist and author of 'The Great Crash' (Piatkus, 2008), a chronicle of the global ramifications of the Wall Street stock market collapse of 1929.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Protectionism Won't Help America's Poor Whites

The first time I encountered the term “poor whites,” I was taking a history class in a South African high school. The term referred to whites, mostly Afrikaners, who were losing their jobs to black competition at the turn of the 19th century.

The whites had a vote. The blacks did not. As a result, the government of the day decided to solve the problem of white poverty by implementing a “color bar,” or job protection for whites. Over time, the color bar grew into a complex system of social and economic planning called apartheid.

The system caused untold damage to black South Africans, but it also harmed the Afrikaners. Many found work in subsidized agriculture, protected manufacturing and in Afrikaner-dominated government. Protected by an artificial wall of quotas, tariffs and subsidies, they failed to sufficiently develop their “human capital.” After apartheid ended, poor whites re-emerged and constitute about 8 percent of South African whites today. When I arrived in South Africa, white beggars were inconceivable. When I left, they were everywhere. Poverty had, once again, become a multi-racial phenomenon.

I tell this story because the problem of “poor whites” has recently become a major topic of conversation here in the United States. To be sure, there have always been poor whites in the United States. Poverty among Appalachian whites, for example, is notorious and, apparently, intractable.

Then, late last year, Princeton University researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Case’s husband and 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, found that death rates among middle-aged American whites started to rise at the turn of the new millennium. (Full disclosure, Angus Deaton is a board member of Human Progress, which I edit.) According to their study,

This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall.

At the heart of the problem seem to be poor and uneducated whites who live in rural areas. As an ever-growing number of Americans move to the cities, those who are left behind see their support groups — friends, families and churches — decimated. To make matters worse, they are also the ones with the least ability to cope in an increasingly demanding economic environment that puts a premium on high skills and risk-taking. All too often, they find solace in alcohol and opiates and, tragically, escape in suicide.

Not surprisingly, many of them believe that they have found salvation in the messianic candidacy of Donald Trump who promises to “take care of everyone.” They are at the core of his burgeoning support. To these people in distress, it matters little that Trump’s economic proposals would almost certainly result in a trade war and an increased cost of living. To them, keeping cheap Mexican labor and Chinese goods out sound like plausible solutions to America’s problems.

With notable exceptions, many conservatives have jumped on the Trump bandwagon and discarded the oft-cited precepts of President Ronald Reagan’s conservatism: competition, free trade, self-reliance and hard work. Reagan understood that competition — domestic and international — is key to making America work better. Many of Trump’s supporters see protection as key to rebuilding the America of yesteryear. This switch, as Kevin Williamson pointed out, is all the more curious, considering that conservatives have rightly identified government protection — affirmative action quotas, welfare payments and job security in parastatals — as a major cause of black underachievement. To urge American blacks to embrace competition, while extending protection to American whites is, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, racist. What’s right for the goose must also be right for the gander.

The case for competition in general and free trade in particular has not changed since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 — the year of America’s Declaration of Independence. Industries that hide behind tariffs or rely on bailouts and subsidies tend to ossify and fall further behind. The same is true of countries and people. The America of yesteryear is gone. To succeed in the era of globalization, our economy must be flexible and open. Protectionism will not solve the problem of white poverty. It will perpetuate it by keeping poor and uneducated white Americans in dying towns and shrinking industries. That is not noble. It is cruel.

This article first appeared at CapX.

Marian L. Tupy

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

My Lyft Ride with a Black Trump Supporter on MLK Day

The media narrative on American politics has become so tedious you don’t have to listen anymore. Every story seems to follow a formula, and never more so on than on the Martin Luther King holiday. Every headline proclaims how black Americans are horrified at Trump’s insensitivity to the historical plight of blacks in the civil rights movement. After all, he attacked Rep. John Lewis, which apparently violates some canon of the civic religion.

"It’s not even about race. Many blacks in this town live better than white people anywhere in the world. But there’s whole communities that have been forgotten."

I had no interest in engaging this debate, but I did call a Lyft car this morning and my driver, a black woman raised in poverty, was very interested in doing so. The news was on and blaring how Trump was attacking the CIA, which made me laugh, and I said, “I’m no Trump supporter but that’s funny.”

She immediately shot back, “What do you not like about Trump?” I said a few things about his trade policies, but she was having none of it.

“Here it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I’m supposed to be all upset that Trump attacked John Lewis, but Trump is right. Lewis said he is not a legitimate president, so yeah Trump got upset. What exactly is Lewis doing to improve the lives of the poor in this town? Nothing. At least Trump has some ideas. He seems to care.”

Ok, now I’m listening.

“I’m glad Lewis marched in the protests so long ago,” she continued, “but you have to do more than march. That’s all these people do is march. Meanwhile, there are sections of Atlanta I’m afraid to drive in. And I say that as a black woman! It’s not even about race. Many blacks in this town live better than white people anywhere in the world. But there’s whole communities that have been forgotten. They are paid off with welfare checks but they don’t have skills or jobs, and they fear for their lives on their own streets.”

She was just getting going, so I wondered how far I could push this. What about Obamacare?

Explosion.

“Don’t get me started. My premiums are through the roof. I can’t afford it. Because I drive all day and night making money, I’m not poor enough to get any subsidies. So this year I’m going to have to pay $750 on my tax return because I can’t afford to buy insurance. But I can’t afford the health care either! And have you seen those deductibles? If anything should happen to you, you go bankrupt. I’ll tell you who benefitted from Obamacare. Not the poor. It’s the insurance companies and the government.”

I pointed out that Hillary Clinton said she would try to improve it.

“You kidding? The whole campaign, she defended all this #@#$!. She is just like the rest of these people, all talk, no action, just like Trump said. She has been pushing a pen for 30 years. She is not affected by high premiums. Her health care is covered. She has no idea what the rest of us are going through.”

But, I said, Trump is rich and well-covered too.

“Yeah but he starts businesses and has to pay workers. He knows how to create jobs. People say he went bankrupt sometimes. That’s what you do if you are hardworking and trying to try new things. Bankruptcy is just part of business. You win and lose but at least he knows how to learn and respond. The rest of these people don’t do anything but give speeches and defend the way things are.”

I asked about Obama and his speech warning about destabilizing important traditions in government.

“See? This is exactly the problem: traditions in government. We need to get rid of those and have something new. Trump is the man to do it. I’m not saying he is right on everything but someone has to do something. Things have been the same for too long around here. In my own life, I’ve had to tried something new every few years. I’m taking classes in IT to try something new. Government needs to do that too.”

I was feeling pretty persuaded by what she was saying here, so I pushed a bit further. But don’t you worry about his thing about foreign trade? I mean, you and I are going to be paying a tax for imports from places he doesn’t like.

"I feel more connection to Trump and his views than I do to Obama and people like John Lewis.”

“You see, Trump thinks just like a good mother. Any mom knows that the most important thing is to keep things right at home. When the home is right, everything else is right. America is home. He says: you can do all the business you want in these 50 states but if you are going to go wandering around the world, you are going to have to pay a price.”

At this point, I winced. There it is, nationalism in a nutshell and the reason why protectionism is so popular. It makes some intuitive sense, until you look at the details. It turns out that absolutely everything is made globally now. You can’t impose a home-alone attitude and expect to have a modern economy.

The Personal is the Political

So I changed the subject again. What about Trump’s personal issues? He seems to have some odd opinions on women and minorities and so on.

“Everyone I know has odd opinions on things, stuff that’s crazy and maybe dangerous. You and I probably have some weird views too. But so long as these views don’t affect the country as a whole, it’s cool. I don’t really care. Plus, I’m a black woman and I’m working hard driving people all over this city. You think if he met me, he wouldn’t like me? I think he would like me. I feel more connection to him and his views than I do to Obama and people like John Lewis.”

We arrived at the airport, and I wished her the best. She apologized for using our ride for a rant. I said that’s perfectly fine. I learned a few things. We smiled and wished each other the best. I only wished that a reporter with the New York Times had been there. Not that it would have been reported. The prevailing narrative is much safer.

Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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