When I signed up yesterday for a free account with the London-based magazine, The Economist, I noticed the following statement at the bottom of the web page:
Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
I take this blurb to mean that, in September 1843 — when the relatively new term “economist” had only recently become familiar to the unworthy, timid, ignorant masses — there was a severe contest going on. Progress vs obstruction.
Do we have a winner yet?
As far as I can tell, intelligence is nothing new, and neither is ignorance. Clearly, they both existed in measurable quantities in September 1843, when Scottish economist James Wilson started a little newspaper called The Economist to muster support for abolishing the British Corn Laws. The Corn Laws were a system of import tariffs designed to subsidize British grain growers, by allowing them to charge artificially inflated prices.
Unfortunately, the British were using the word “corn” to describe cereal grains like wheat, rye, barley and oats. They didn’t yet know how to grow actual corn… even though over here in America — the former British colony — we were already growing it all over the place. We had, in fact, already invented corn flakes.
Not that corn flakes are necessarily a sign of intelligence, but I would assert that they are definitely a sign of ‘progress’.
Tariffs, on the other hand, may have been the very thing to which Mr. Wilson was referring, when he mentioned “unworthy, timid ignorance” in the pages of The Economist.
I don’t even like the sound of the word: tariff. It’s like ‘terror’ and ‘barf’ joined together in the same ugly word.
I wasn’t around in 1843 to read Mr. Wilson’s economic arguments in favor of ditching the British grain tariffs, and I certainly don’t claim to be on the “intelligence” side of his severe contest. I’m much more comfortable claiming to be unworthy, timid, and ignorant. When you’re unworthy, timid, and ignorant, you always have an excuse handy. I mean, one of those deficiencies ought to fit most any situation.
But I have been following the American vs China controversy, from a safe distance, and — as unworthy and ignorant as I might be — I would still propose that whenever the government slaps a hefty tariff on all the goods I have been buying for the past ten years at Walmart, there’s one person who ends up paying for those tariffs.
Me.
As a little reminder. In 2018, President Trump launched a wave of tariffs on $370 billion worth of Chinese goods, to which China had responded with levies on $185 billion of US goods. President Trump bargained some of the Chinese tariffs away in a February 2020 “Phase 1” deal, with Beijing agreeing to cut some of its tariffs, and to buy $200 billion worth of specified US products through 2021.
In other words, President Trump and his administration told the Chinese what goods to buy. I find that a little bit troubling because it sounds suspiciously like government control of the free market. Maybe other unworthy, timid, ignorant Daily Post readers feel the same way?
The trade war didn’t work out as President Trump planned, however. As of September 2020, China has purchased only about 50 percent of what it had promised to purchase, and in fact, Chinese purchases of American goods are lower now than when the trade war started. As of November 2020, America’s trade deficit with China stands exactly where it did when President Trump moved into the White House, while our global trade deficit is substantially worse than it was when he took office.
But the worst part of the whole thing: I can no longer find my favorite soy sauce at Walmart.
Sure, it’s easy to say, “Let them eat corn flakes.” And maybe that’s exactly what an intelligent person would say. Maybe, like, an economist would say that.
If that’s how they want to play the game, I will simply remain unworthy, timid, and ignorant, and see how they like it.