Though widely opposed if not despised – including by many Republicans – the Trump Administration’s trade policy is delivering impressive results, writes Henry Olsen at Commonplace. Tariffs will likely haul in US$360 billion this fiscal year – while recession is nowhere in sight. Growth is strong, wages are rising, unemployment is barely 4 percent (vs. Canada’s 7 percent) and stock markets are setting records. Tariffs, Olsen suggests, could become the new orthodoxy.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
