Well, we now know that President Trump’s Liberation Day on April 2, when he announced a new regime of tariffs, was really World Bunker Buster Day.
I’m still a little flummoxed that the wise stock market traders decided that stocks were suddenly worth 20 percent less than on April 1. Because I would have thought that the rampages of DOGE on the corrupt educated-class NGO imperium would be a much bigger deal for world prosperity than teaching the Euros and the CCP a lesson in bilateral trade.
Maybe the answer lies buried in Power Line’s application of Stein’s Law:
- U.S. share of world population: 4%
- U.S. share of world GDP: 26%
- U.S. share of world wealth: 29%
- U.S. share of world debt: 35%
- U.S. share of worldwide military spending: 37%
- U.S. share of worldwide foreign aid: 40%
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Unlike Power Line, I worry about Stein’s Law in the context of the “U.S. share of world NGO grantmaking.” I have an acquaintance who got into the university faculty game back in the 1960s. What fun they all had getting faculty jobs for their friends and gorging on government grants. But the outlook for the grandchildren is not so great and so, in faculty world, Trump is to blame. If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
In advanced intellectual circles — venture-capitalist world, but not NGO world — bunker buster is called “disruption.” Every time the world changes, in economic, technical, or political revolution, first of all you get disruption. Sometimes the disruption leads to disaster, as with Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao. Sometimes it leads to a new world, as in relativity, quantum mechanics, the SUV, the internet. But almost always the disruption is a “surprise” — and probably heresy to the priests of the conventional wisdom.
Obviously, Trump’s tariffs go beyond surprise, and maybe beyond heresy to the believers in a global world order where wise globalist cardinals chant psalms to the name of free trade. The question is whether the “disruption” reorders the world in a beneficial way or in a harmful way. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tells Tucker Carlson that all will be well. Bill Ackman says:
Our trading partners have taken advantage of us for decades after tariffs were no longer needed to help them rebuild their economies after WWII.
Stop Press: Bill Ackman tweets: don’t be surprised if President Trump pauses the tariffs Monday April 7, because negotiations.
take a hike after he told them all to divest from the USA.
They said:
“It is out of the question to stop investing in the United States, especially in the current economic slump.”
Oh well. But I am sure that the much bigger issue for the best French politicians is to stop the far-right populist menace Marine Le Pen from polluting the sacred halls of the Élysée Palace, once home to France’s exquisite Madame de Pompadour, top-performing aide to Louis XV.
But “I don’t really care” about the palace intrigues in Europe. The immediate question for you and me is how good the aging 78-year-old Trump still is at his iconic “Art of the Deal.”
Especially when Curtis Yarvin warns that the U.S. is now “an aging empire.”
In the young, everything heals as if by providence. In the old, nothing, nothing fixes itself.
Good point. But whatabout aging Europe, that hates the Trump tariffs? Or aging China, that thought to cure its Century of Humiliation with the totalitarian injection of European Marxism? After the Nightmare of Mao is the Miracle of Xi for real, or is it the final disaster of an aging culture?
And if and when the U.S. empire sinks beneath the waves, what would replace it? Islam?
I hope not.
My pet prophecy is that North America will be reborn after the completion of the immigration of East and South Asians. Last Friday we enjoyed the cherry blossoms along Azalea Way in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum. Believe me: the East Asians were out there in battalion strength.
I wonder if history will rhyme. After Europe colonized North America and annihilated its inhabitants with European diseases, the triumphant North Americans returned to Europe in 1917 to teach aging Europe a well-deserved lesson. Do you think that the East Asians in North America, brimming with youthful enthusiasm, will someday announce their own Bunker Buster Day and return to aging China to teach it a lesson?
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Image: Pixabay
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