Yesterday (3/06), TTP’s Jack Kelly wrote “Why Trump Is Right on Trade.”  It really hit a nerve, eliciting a number of excellent insightful comments, both pro and anti, on the TTP Forum.  Here is why I think Kelly is right.  It’s based on my personal business experience.

I have direct-reduced iron producing clients in 13 nations. These are the first tier beneficiation plants that convert iron ore into iron pellets for further use in steel making. Iron oxide in the ore is reduced to iron metal using coal or metallurgical coke as a reductant in very large rotary kilns. The process consumes a lot of thermal energy and can have a heavy environmental footprint.

I personally know my way around most of these facilities, know their production costs, their production efficiency, plant and equipment life remaining, and the names of the husbands and wives of the executives. I know the union bosses if they have them. I know this industry.

Free trade theory is discussed daily on American heavy industry shop floors. The blue collar guys understand the theory, they understand Milton Friedman and have studied Free to Choose at length. Many subscribe to the Cato Institute letter, FEE, or even that Mises Institute at Auburn. They understand the concepts as though their lives depend on it…because they do.

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Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. One reason: there were only two attendants to accommodate 11 passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance.

Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed—late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights—most of the 11 wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out.

It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight.

Special blue parking placards were initially a long-overdue effort to help the disabled. But these days, the definition of “disabled” has so expanded that a large percentage of the population can qualify for special parking privileges—or cheat in order to qualify.

In California, 26,000 disabled parking placards are currently issued to people over 100 years of age, even though state records list only about 8,000 living centenarians.

As in just about every cause progressives advocate, this is not progress.

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Much has been written in the past few days about the balderdash that was the Oscar Awards program that aired Sunday night (3/04).  Those who lost those four hours of their lives to what amounted to an interminable, self-aggrandizing celebration by celebrities surely regret the waste of that time.

At least they now know what OSCAR stands for: Overrated Self-congratulating Celebrities Acting Ridiculously Self-righteous.

Has there ever been a more self-obsessed group of narcissists outside Washington, DC?  If one were deposited on Earth like the Brother From Another Planet, one would think the creatures in the Kodak theater Sunday night were the kings and queens of the universe.

One can only conclude that they, so blinded by the light of their own reflected glory in film, actually believe they are the kings and queens of the universe.  Why else shoot hot dogs at the peons in the cheap seats watching the show on a big screen?

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Italy has progressed from pre-insurrectional anger to outright revolt. Insouciant markets are betting that this can somehow be contained. It smacks of delusion.

Risk spreads on Italian 10-year bonds are exactly where they were a week ago before the "anti-system" parties of Left and Right swept away the post-War establishment. The euro has shrugged off the vote entirely, rising 2% against the dollar since the earthquake.

Investors are acting as if they think Italy’s "poteri forti" and its eternal mandarin class will organize another technocrat government regardless of what has happened, or that the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio will cobble together a co-opted centre-Left coalition that scarcely differs from the last one.

Now damage control has begun. Praise is suddenly effusive for the elegant choir-boy leader Di Maio sitting on 33% of the vote. “Five Star does not frighten us, we have lived through worse,” the business lobby Confindustria says.

This is to play down the genesis of the Five Star phenomenon and the party’s avowed intent to push an eclectic anti-capitalist agenda inspired by the neo-Marxist writings of Thomas Piketty.  The markets are singing in the dark.

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Harden your hearts.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 68 million people around the world are or at risk of becoming refugees.

The migration of a few million people has already turned the European Union inside out and motivated the election of an America-first presidency. What we have seen so far, though, is nothing compared to what is to come.

The problems of too many Third World countries are physically too large for the West to remedy: The sheer numbers of people in distress soon will exceed the total population of the industrial world.

President Trump's reported bleephole comments about certain countries as sources of prospective immigrants may sound callous. He simply is ahead of the curve.

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The lovely and courageous Dana Loesch was absolutely correct when she commented that the Left loves mass shootings – not the tragedy aspect, but the ratings gold, of which they leap to take advantage.

Before the bodies are removed from the site, the Left begins politicizing the event.  The massacre in Florida was no exception.

Ms. Loesch, a representative of the NRA, was also correct to point out that the Left media who are so obsessed with using the Florida catastrophe for their own ends never pay a moment of attention to the thousands of grieving mothers of the dead in Chicago.  Not one bit.

When someone points to this fact, he is generally called a racist.  It is racist to point out that more people were shot and killed in Chicago this month (31), four times as many in 2018 so far (67) than died at that Florida high school (17).  Go figure.

The purveyors of progressivism’s  hatred of the president has made them all neurologically dysfunctional.  So much so it is turning them into criminals.

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As you watch this clip of Rex Harrison asking “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man?” from My Fair Lady in 1964, try to imagine the eardrum-busting shrieks of outrage on the Left if this over-half-century-old comedy were performed today – much less gaining Harrison an Oscar for Best Actor.

Okay, then let’s ask, “Why Can’t A Woman Be Less Like A Man?”  To answer, consider:

Two conflicting strains of contemporary obsession collided fatally in Parkland, Florida, two weeks ago, when an unstable teenage boy brought a rifle to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students.

The first is guns and what, if anything, should be done about them in a country whose constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.

The second is the concept of “toxic masculinity,” the current bugbear of the female social-justice warriors whose brand of “feminism” is essentially misandry writ large.

The concept is an appalling combination of fear, ignorance, misapplied compassion, prescription drugs, and social mores—and a clear and present danger to American society that we must sort out, fast.

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An important piece of news went practically unnoticed last month.  Nature, the prestigious science journal, reported (1/18) that China is now the world’s largest producer of scientific articles.

Granted, quantity does not equal quality, thus Chinese publications are not as influential as North American and European studies. Yet, China’s scientific leap forward has geopolitical consequences.

Take the case of research-led think tanks in China. An almost nonexistant entity in the country a few years back, they are now a relevant part of China’s foreign policy establishment and look actively engaged in the mission of making the “Chinese way” more palatable to foreign peoples and governments.

As such, they are the products of ingenious political engineering and marketing by the Chinese Communists.

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