Free Bird
TheHawk
Junior Chimp
Posts: 5,917
Political Matrix
E: 0.84, S: -5.48
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« on: January 02, 2019, 03:45:33 AM » |
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« edited: January 02, 2019, 04:01:26 AM by Free Bird »
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Trump and Tucker are odd ducks economically. They strike me as a strange mix of Neoliberalism and Keynesianism. They both favor minimizing regulation (although Tucker has said he would regulate automation as a way to save workers' jobs) as a way to spur growth (along with tax cuts, more on that later), but have both openly hinted that they wouldn't mind having the United States return to more aggressive trustbusting, especially with newer industries, and have strongly implied that they are okay with labor unions.
They, Trump especially, are protectionist in nature, but otherwise, favor lower taxes. But that's where it also gets tricky. Trump cut corporate taxes in a supply-side fashion but seems to want/believe his income tax cuts to be demand-side (Keynesian) in nature, at least publicly. At the same time, Trump has railed against the Fed for raising rates, even if they are meant to more closely match the mood of the market, a tenant of the Austrian school. They have also both spoken in favor of infrastructure spending as a sort of "investment in the people," generating economic growth both by the construction itself and by the improvements in quality of life/productivity that the completed projects would grant people (i.e getting to work faster and so on).
They, Carlson especially, favor merit-based immigration under the belief that it will increase wages for the lower classes (at least publicly that's one of their primary reasons but that's neither here nor there for our purposes here).
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, they are, for right-winger standards, very protective of entitlements and the safety net, barely hiding their disgust at the idea of cutting them like Paul Ryan compulsively suggests. There are other strange examples like this, but most of you probably already know them, anyway! In short, really, they seem to favor a healthy/not excessively business environment for the employers, but not at the expense of a fair/monitored playing field and good conditions for the employees, which most people in their respective camps tend to view as mutually exclusive, at least in my experience.
It doesn't matter, for the purposes of this discussion, whether or not you agree with these philosophical inclinations. I just want to find out what economic school of thought they seem to be subscribing to because their ideas seem very all over the place/pragmatic in my eyes.
What school is this? Even if they don't actively devote themselves to the school, most people, economically, will follow almost all of the tenants of this or that system of thought. Not these two, unless I am missing something. Do they belong to a school at all, or are they just pragmatists (again, at least publicly)? Or, perhaps, have they, Tucker especially, created a whole new school of economic thought by taking aspects from Keynesianism and Neoliberalism/the Chicago School and putting them together? Part of me, personally, wants to think of them as the first advocates for the American School in quite some time, but I don't think, at least from what I know about it, that all of the pieces are there, at least not yet.
Again, no owning the cons here, just analysis of what they believe through the lens of economic philosophy, please. Maybe disassociate the ideas from the people I named here and just examine them, as a totality, on their own, Maybe that will help to temporarily rid most of your minds of the very likely hatreds you hold for both of these men.
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