Further reflections on our current tariff situation.
Photo Source, Nobel foundation – http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/schrodinger-bio.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6209244
Point 1: This sort of thing — the current tariff situation — is part and parcel of the “unitary executive” package that MAGA installed in the Federal government.
1.1 If you concentrate all the power in the hands of an individual, as the MAGA party has succeeded in doing, here in the U.S., with few-to-no effective restraints (e.g., Congress cedes control, Supreme Court defers, ignore everybody else),
1.2 And if The Leader has some wacky ideas, is unteachable, perhaps easily influenced, aging, …
1.3 You’re stuck with The Leader’s decisions, anyway, because that’s how you set it up.
Stripping away our long-standing system of checks and balances is an inherently high-variance strategy. People imagine great governing by a philosopher-king. But you can get kleptocracy. Sometimes kakistocrasty. Not to exclude both at once.
And sometimes, in some important areas, unleashing The Leader is a dangerously crazy thing to do.
In hindsight, I’d like to think that a lot of our leadership now realizes that giving this man (the President), this weapon (unlimited control over tariffs) was not a good idea.
But as long as the House continues to take this lying down, there is no off button.
Checks and balances. Maybe God got that part right.
I miss checks and balances.
Addendum: And, after reading Krugman’s piece this morning, I’d maybe go so far as to say that the fundamental uncertainty of unitary-executive decision-making is incompatible with the traditional role of dollar-denominated assets as safe-haven assets. These idiots may have just managed to dislodge the dollar from its role as the foundation currency of the international financial system, because we can no longer be trusted.
Point 2: Do we need a Central Committee now?
How do other authoritarian regimes avoid this problem? This problem being the potential for The Leader to make spectacularly crap decisions, against all sane advice?
Maybe they don’t. Here I’m thinking of some of the initiatives under Mao, at least some of which almost surely impoverished the Chinese people. Stalin’s planting of Lysenko’s wheat, maybe.
So, this may simply be an unacknowledged downside of the unitary-executive approach to Federal government. You will get some nut-job decisions on really important issues, and you have given yourself no recourse.
Anyway, if we’re tossing all the old-fashioned checks and balances, is it really optimal to put nothing in their place? That’s looking like a big “no”, to me.
So I wonder if we might take some clues from successful autocracies elsewhere. Maybe we need some new entity — the King’s Privy Council, the Party Central Committee, the Gang of Eight — to provide some filtering beyond whatever occurs within The Leader’s brain.
I don’t think a Cabinet full of sycophants fulfills this role. I wish the MAGAs would come up with something that does. They’re running this show.
