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Townhall
Finance
Mitt Romney Is Tough On China,
Weak
On Reality
by Jerry Bowyer
Mr.
Romney, here is the low point
of your participation in this week’s foreign policy debate:
SCHIEFFER:
Well, Governor, let me
just ask you. If you declare them a currency manipulator on day one,
some
people are — say you’re just going to start a trade war with China on
day one.
Is that — isn’t there a risk that that could happen?
ROMNEY:
Well, they sell us about
this much stuff every year, and we sell them about this much stuff
every year.
So it’s pretty clear who doesn’t want a trade war. And there’s one
going on
right now, which we don’t know about it. It’s a silent one. And they’re
winning.
We
have enormous trade imbalance
with China, and it’s worse this year than last year, and it’s worse
last year
than the year before. And so we have to understand that we can’t just
surrender
and lose jobs year in and year out. We have to say to our friend in
China,
look, you guys are playing aggressively. We understand it. But this
can’t keep
on going. You can’t keep on holding down the value of your currency…”
Mr.
Romney, it’s not really your
fault. You attended Harvard Business School in the early 1970s. This
was a high
water mark for Keynesian economics which ruled, virtually not only
without
challenge, but virtually without even the knowledge that there was any
alternative.
Later,
the rise of stagflation
would open a national debate between Keynesianism and supply-side
thinking, but
by then you were no longer studying economics and were embroiled in the
day-to-day challenges of business management. You missed Robert Mundell
and Art
Laffer’s challenge to the academic status quo. You missed Milton
Friedman’s
refutation of the socialist model, as well as Hayek and Von Mises’ case
for the
denationalization of money. In other words, you missed almost
everything a
future president would need in order to understand the way the world
works when
it comes to currency markets. While Reagan’s lax attitude towards
schooling and
his C+ grade average landed him at Eureka College, not nearly
prestigious
enough for the Keynesians to grab control of, your intelligence and
drive got
you into the top business school in the world. Reagan got the better
end of
that deal.
So,
if you’re going to avoid
speaking nonsense about the dollar, and even worse, hastening its
demise,
you’re going to need to go back to the beginning, to first principles.
Here
they are...
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
Finance
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