Laura Ingraham Is Just, Plain Wrong!

Wow! What's up with Laura Ingraham? Her bash China rhetoric is becoming a fetish. From her website: 

"Call Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Cantor, and the 16 GOP Senators who voted against the China bill and tell them to stand up against Red China and their currency manipulation in order to protect American jobs!”

I don't understand. Is Ms. Ingraham's iconoclastic crusade merely a populist pitch for ratings? I sure hope not.

Look, even a political dunce should be suspicious of a bill co-sponsored by the most rabid progressives in the Senate, not to mention the Senate's only avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Moreover, any student of economics and history with a modicum of knowledge about the Great Depression should be suspicious of a bill calling for protective tariffs during our modern day Great Recession. Laura, does Smoot-Hawley ring a bell?

The first principle of property, freedom and peace is free trade. What gives the US federal government the right to act to restrict or hinder the free exchange of private property between willing partners?

Every day millions of Americans willingly trade millions of dollars to Walmart in exchange for a plethora of goods they know were manufactured by Chinese peasants. So what?  Why should the US government care what citizens buy and from whom or from where they buy it?

According to Ingraham, the federal government should rightly care, and should rightly coerce Americans consumers to pay up to 25% more for goods manufactured in China. Why? Because the China trade is responsible for American unemployment.

Say what?

Yes, Mr. Average Joe, Ingraham wants you to pay 25% more for everything you buy at Walmart because it's basically Walmart's fault and your fault that your neighbor down the street lost his job making Zenith TV's in Illinois. For your neighbor's sake, Walmart should have sold American and you should have bought American despite the higher prices. That way Zenith would still be in Illinois.

Looking at this another way, Ingraham wants the government to raise prices on consumer goods for 100% of Americans because 10% of Americans are out of work. 

Now there is an idea that is bound to make life better in this country. 

If there is anyone out there who agrees with Ingraham, let me know why. I just don't get it.

Oh, I get the currency manipulation thing. The US government constantly inflates its currency and the Chinese government does the same thing only a little better. As a result, the Chinese Yuan is always a bit "undervalued" relative to the Dollar. Consequently, American goods are at a competitive disadvantage to start with.

This is heresy in the modern world of fiat currency and perpetual monetary inflation. Doesn't China realize the way this gentleman's game is supposed to be played? China is supposed to inflate the Yuan at the same pace all other players inflate their currency, but most especially China must always and forever inflate its currency at the same pace the United States inflates the Dollar. To fail to do so disrupts world trade and world order and undermines the authority of the monetary mavens in the United States who own the casino and, by rights, ought to control the game.

Boo Hoo.

If the United States government were truly against currency manipulation, it would hitch the Dollar's star to an ounce of gold and let the chips fall where they may. However, letting the chips fall where they may is unthinkable to the elites in charge in both China and the US. If there is one thing both players in this game understand, it is that the house must always hold the advantage. If either government could tolerate a genuine free market, they would have one, and the world's headlong rush to statism would see a beginning to its end.

The only reason China is able to circumvent the free market's valuation of its currency is the same reason the United States is able to do so. Free markets in their currencies do not exist anywhere in the world. Both countries are able to print their respective currencies endlessly and in whatever quantity they want without real consequence to their treasuries. 

It is a game, Mr. Average Joe, and all the players at the table are cheaters. Thus, their argument over playing by the rules is a sham, a mere gentleman's squabble among thieves.

Wise up, Joe (and Laura). It is not the rules but the game itself that is rigged against you.