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Methinks some here need a basic lesson on how free markets and international supply chains work.

Mycroft said:
Friedman is correct.


And yes, Trump can do this.
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And that is the difference between communist and fascist totalitarian economics and free market capitalism. Those like Trump, or Lenin, believe that people have to be ordered to make pencils and that each stage of production and processing is something to be done through either central planning (communism) or ruler impulse (Trump, Stalin, etc.).

And when people trade, rather than threaten each other with dire consequences, it promotes peaceful relations.

Trump's actions will be remembered, and the payback will come even after he is gone from office.
 
Milton Freeman kind of glosses over the supply chain. Products to construct the pencil don't just magically appear at the pencil factory. They're shipped there. There's costs associated with shipping and there's authority or permission to trade across borders. Anyone who is part of the supply chain can take a cut of the profits. If trade volume is even then both countries it the tariffs will cancel itself out. We only have a problem if trade is one-sided.
 
There's a disconnect between everyone else and the MAGAverse, since those outside of it understand that there are consequences to actions. The MAGAverse seems to think the US can take actions and not have consequences because they have absorbed Trump's hubris as their own and think other countries are without recourse in who they do business with.
 
Seriously?
 

Apparently, you missed the point. Friedman provided insight into an elementary principle in economics, that absent interference by political forces, people from all over the world cooperate with each other through free trade. None act out of a coordinated and unified goal to make a pencil (save for the final assembly) and many have no idea, nor care, what purpose their contribution is. Each acts in self-interest, selling material and labor, whose end result is a pencil.

In such a system, absent fraud or physical force, there isn't a need for a subjective moralism called "one-sided". Everybody buys and sells the land, capital, raw materials, and labor to deliver it to the consumer who freely purchases the person, also providing value by paying for it.

The consumers money, the abstraction of value into a instrument of trade, comes from somewhere. If it were not so, the consumer would and could not purchase. If the seller is satisfied, and the buyer is satisfied, who are we to interfere with taxes to discourage their own right to trade?

In the end, as long as the seller finds value in the US dollar beyond what he purchases from US material output, then trade happens. If and when supply outstrips demand then the dollar value will fall and give a market adjustment making US products more affordable.
 
Its actually you who put the political/moralism label on tariffs and taxes. How is that cost any different than something like shipping? It's actually just dollars to importer and exporter. Tax revenue provides money so the goverment can provide goods and services to its citizens. That's value added, just like shipping. Trade imbalance is just like wealth imbalance, too far out of wack and it can wreck a country... but the free market doesn't care if your county blows up, matter of fact you deserve it.
 

You're reading something not there. I didn't morally label tariffs as anything other than what they are: "taxes to discourage trade", namely to discourage trade for anything owned, made, or delivered from outside the political borders of the United States.

You asked "how is that cost any different than shipping"?

As conservatives know, shipping is a private market service voluntarily purchased by a buyer to deliver goods while tariffs are a tax on the buyer: an involuntary (coerced) payment to pay off the ruling body to allow those products to be delivered, to pay for what otherwise would be your natural right to do without government.

In short, iIt is NOT for a particular service or product provided by the government to aid in the delivery; it is the opposite - a tax to discourage delivery and if that fails, a source of profit to a third party (government).

No one is disputing that taxes are, at least in theory, a source of revenue for the government to provide value to some other dependency interest group, nor is anyone disputing that taxes are not also necessary for the common good (eg national defense). But not all taxes are equal or fair, and some like tariffs also have other purposes and consequences that harm the general welfare by hobbling the supply stream and driving up costs.

So, they are not "just like shipping" - they are closer to "just like coerced skim" from a legitimate business and its customers.

Finally, countries don't blow up because there is a trade imbalance, but they have blown up because of trade hostile policies, tariffs and duties over trade goods: ever heard of the Boston Tea Party, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, etc? Are you aware that one reason Japan went to war against the US was the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 and then the US trade oil embargo?

It is true that I have a trade deficit with Apple, Microsoft, and many others, but that doesn't mean I will blow up because they buy nothing from me. These firms will gladly take my money and both of us are happy with the imbalance. I have more to fear from a tariff on those products than "trade imbalance" .
 
You have no idea what a trade imbalance is.
 
maxparrish said:

Or Trump can order people to cooperate or face tariffs.
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Let me flip the script real quick…


Here’s a video of 10th-century surgeons confidently discussing the human body—heart surgeons, no less. I dare you to watch it. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn something! Or at the very least, you'll get a sense of what it sounds like when people talk with absolute certainty... while having absolutely no idea what they're talking about.


Yes, Milton Friedman was a Nobel Prize-winning economist. No one’s disputing that. But let’s not canonize the man. His ideas weren’t divine revelations—they were economic theories, many of which do not hold up in the tangled, digitized, globalized mess that is the 2025 economy.


And yet—ironically—I’ll quote him: “One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”


Exactly. That’s precisely what you’re doing.


Despite overwhelming consensus from actual economists—not YouTube commentators in ties—that Trump’s economic policies were riddled with structural flaws from day one, people are still parroting them like gospel. Meanwhile, prices keep climbing, inequality festers, and the only real growth is in magical thinking.


Repackaging failed policies and selling them with a new slogan doesn’t make them work—it just makes you look desperate. Or deluded. Or both.


This will run so it has to continue below!

Diving Mullah
 
Classic Milton Friedman-style parable of the pencil paints a lyrical picture of spontaneous order in the free market, it also leaves a few rather important things out.

Yes, it’s true: no single person could make a pencil alone. But no single person had to—because human beings have always specialized, traded, and cooperated, long before Milton Friedman canonized the idea with graphite and erasers.


But to call this a celebration of the “magic” of the free market without acknowledging the messy reality behind that magic is a bit like praising the elegance of a soufflé without mentioning who’s stuck washing the dishes. Let's break it down:


1.​


The pencil’s rubber came from Malaya? Ah yes, the British-controlled Malaya. That’s not exactly “free” trade—it’s imperial resource extraction, with rubber plantations established by colonial force, not market signals. The global supply chains that make pencils (and iPhones) possible are not merely the outcome of individual liberty and invisible hands; they’re also shaped by centuries of colonization, military force, government subsidies, trade deals, tariffs, and regulatory frameworks.


So if you're marveling at the pencil, tip your hat to the British Navy and IMF structural adjustment policies while you're at it.

2.​


Sure, you paid a “trifling sum” for that pencil—but not because the free market is a magical harmony machine. It’s because many of the real costs were externalized. Did the price of the pencil reflect the deforestation in the Pacific Northwest? The unsafe working conditions in South American graphite mines? The child labor sometimes involved in rubber production?


Nope. That “magic” is just sleight of hand—offloading the cost to ecosystems, future generations, and exploited labor.


3.​


Friedman would have us believe the price system is a force for world peace. But the same global supply chains that bring us cheap goods also bring us resource wars, labor exploitation, and geopolitical instability. Ask the people of Congo whether the demand for cobalt (for smartphones and batteries, not pencils) has fostered peace in their region.


Markets may align interests, but they don’t eliminate power imbalances—and they don’t magically foster justice or fairness.

4.​


While Friedman romanticizes decentralization, markets don’t just “self-regulate” into utopia. Child labor laws, antitrust enforcement, environmental regulations, and consumer protections—all of these were hard-won through collective action against the unregulated free market.


Left to its own devices, the market doesn’t hand you a pencil—it hands you a sweatshop and an oil spill. Regulation isn’t a hindrance to freedom—it’s what keeps the pencil from costing someone else their lungs or livelihood.


In Short:​


The pencil is indeed a miracle—but not because of “the free market.” It’s the result of human cooperation, yes, but also government intervention, historical power dynamics, and a global system that’s just as exploitative as it is efficient. The invisible hand may be guiding production, but it’s often wearing a velvet glove over a clenched fist.


And sometimes, to paraphrase Marx, the pencil, like all commodities, has blood in its graphite.

So Miltion is dead wrong in this regard, becaue ignoring and whitewashing all the real world realities!

Diving Mullah
 
I detest most of Milton Friedman's thinking, and many of his amoral acolytes. He was responsible for untold misery in Central and South America by pushing inappropriate economic theories on undeserving populations. But, the fundamental outline in that short clip is correct and important to understand.

This regime's "economists"are even less moral than Friedman. He was amoral - he believed his theories and didn't care how they affected people. These guys know better and want to inflict misery on others. The whole tariffs thing is stupid economically. Every economist knows that. But the regime sees it as a vehicle to subjugate. They want destruction and chaos. This is their vehicle for their evil intentions.
 

There is not such thing as a trade imbalance. All trade is equal.

We give Canada X value of goods, services, and currency and receive X value in goods, services, and currency in return.
 

I'm thinking that the lack of inflection in written text has failed to convey the sarcasm in my last statement regarding Trump, loloring your assumptions about why I provided a clip of Friedman. In a nutshell:

1) Friedman was a strong supporter of free markets, domestic and foreign, as opposed to government interventionism; e.g. tariffs, wage and price controls, etc.

2) Trump does not believe in free markets delivering the best results, and believes they don't "come out" with the results that he wants. Hence he believes that commanding economic forces (and punishing those who don't comply) is "right".

3) I fully agree that "that Trump’s economic policies were riddled with structural flaws from day one, people are still parroting them like gospel."

In sum, my criticism of Trump is exactly the same as Milton Friedman's position on tariffs, as well as the position of all or almost all economists.
 
On another thread i had a colloquey with another poster - we were discussing the various positions on morality - and he used the term "anti-moral" to describe the regime. I think that descriptor is spot on. This regime surveys the possible positions to an issue - in this case, economics - and deliberately picks the worst option. As I said, then, "It's not just not caring, it is knowing something is wrong and pursuing that path rather than just neglecting to do the right thing."
 
BTW, some time back I started a thread to discuss economic basics. It's still active
 

All of human history has been a mix of violent and peaceful conduct; and there are few societies where they don't coexist as a means of creation and acquisition. Even the Mongol Empire with its bloody conquests and sacking were heavily intermixed with Mongols as traders and merchants - it was a society that also promoted trade, protected merchants, and created long distance trade across Eurasia. Indeed, traders and merchants gained prestige in Mongol society.

So yes, there is "blood" in social interactions, just as there are interactions without blood. But if that is all you can deduce about economics, then you are stuck with little more than dismissive moralism about humankind; a refusal to acknowledge the underlying different principles in the process's that are behind "cooperation" in trade vs non-cooperation in use of bloody force.

Who is sometimes stuck washing the dishes isn't a relevant consideration for this fundamental lesson in economics and trade UNLESS you believe free trade can never supply graphite, rubber, not without using bloody force by Imperialists or Colonialists. (If you do, you have more in common with Trump than you might assume.)

So ya, Trump, or Maduro, or Kim Jong Un, or the old communist party share the common and false assumption that a free market doesn't "come out right" and that coercion and state orders are inecessary to produce and obtain pencils.

They are wrong.
 
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There’s no such thing as a truly “free market” in today’s economic system. That’s a myth. What you can have is a well-regulated and balanced market—if lawmakers actually focused on making laws rather than lining their own pockets. And yes, before someone starts foaming at the mouth, Trump, Maduro, and Kim Jong Un are also wrong. That doesn't suddenly make Milton Friedman right by default.


I wasn’t going after you—I was going after the concept of "trade imbalance." When you go to a supermarket, you exchange money for goods. That, by definition, is a balanced trade. You give, you get.


The reality is, there are certain things the U.S. simply doesn’t have the capacity to build—because we lack the machinery, the infrastructure, or the skilled labor. Sure, maybe we could build it eventually, but by the time we do, the business is already dead in the water.


Yes, technically, companies could make the parts overseas, ship them here, and assemble them in the U.S. Or they could set up an entirely new plant to do it all domestically. Which one do you think costs more?


Even the factories that do assemble in the U.S. took years—sometimes decades—to reach production-worthy efficiency. This isn’t plug-and-play.


At the end of the day, all this economic hair-splitting and patriotic semantics are just smoke and mirrors—meant to distract the public while the real game happens behind closed doors: politicians and executives lining their pockets at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Diving Mullah
 

Whatever our differences are concerning the actual criteria of what is or is not a "well regulated" or "balanced" market, the foundation of commerce in the west are free markets in commerce, with tweaks and regulations as a secondary layer of adjustments for other goals than economic efficiency or maximum production.

Trump's continued obtuseness to this reality - so obtuse he fires the BLM head because it didn't invent numbers to please Trump - has reminded many critics of capitalism that there ARE foundations and you don't benefit from "reform" if you ignore its structure - no more than you improve the health of a person by employing voodoo and bloodletting while ignoring their body;s symptoms and life sustaining processes.

This article expresses the difference between criticizing some results of the system as opposed to criticizing the foundation of the system. It is by a critic of the market who now sees there are worse things than the market.

I owe the libertarians an apology

It turns out there are worse monsters than the market.
www.noahpinion.blog
 
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To the consumer?
 
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