In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on.
Peter Navarro
Donald Trump is not a protectionist. If he imposes tariffs on China or any other country that cheats, all he wants to do is defend America against unfair trade practices.
My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics - the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.
I am of the school that believes, for the most part, that gays are born and not made. That is, I believe - and there appears to be significant scientific evidence to back me up - that there is a genetic predisposition to be gay.
One of the principles of the Trump administration is that we will never sacrifice our economy on the altar of foreign policy.
We're already in a trade war with China. The problem is we've not been fighting back. Trump, through tariffs, wants to call a truce.
Al Gore has all of the positive attributes of Bill Clinton but is saddled with none of his negatives. He's a great big teddy bear of a political figure - Teflon coated, road tested, and everyone's nice guy.
A campaign is a complex organism that requires expensive parts. Finding the right parts and meshing them together into a cohesive working unit is an art in and of itself.
We've got tremendous dumping of steel into our country and aluminum into our country - all manner of products being sold in our country at below cost, stealing American jobs or depressing wages.
If you've been to China, you know there are over 100 cities in China, and the pollution levels are just horrific - 60,000 people a year die in Chinese factories and facilities because they don't have any safety regulations. It's a carnage; it's Dickensian.
During a campaign, the trick is to spend no more than 15 to 30 seconds with anyone and to keep moving so that you not only shake a few hundred hands but also have a thousand people see you doing it.
I want consumers to connect the dots, to go to any store and look at the label and connect the dots between buying cheap China products, which is better for the wallet, and all the other things we lose, like jobs.
I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs. And I started to ask questions why. And, at that point, all roads were leading to Beijing.
If money is the root of all evil, then China's manipulation of its currency, the yuan, is the tap root of everything wrong with the U.S.-China trade relationship.
We prefer paychecks to welfare checks for the American people and a robust middle class with rising wages.
Even though Mr. Trump is a billionaire, he is still able to relate to average working men and women. The billionaire gets along with the bricklayer.
Cheap labor is a small part of the problem at work here. If it were only cheap labor, America would be in trouble. Because it's other things, too, we have a great chance to turn it around. Here's the problem: Our high corporate tax rate pushes our companies offshore. Our high regulatory burden pushes our companies offshore.
There's a natural antipathy on the part of the voters to a continuation of globalization as we know it. It's simply a code word today for bad trade deals that disadvantage the American people.
The biggest single thing China needs to do is build an emergent middle class and domestic consumption, and the best way to do that is through pension and health-care reform, and currency reform to establish purchasing power among its citizens.
It's extraordinary to me - you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly, through bad trade deals, destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China's entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal - every single one of those.
If you study how Ronald Reagan won first the 1980 election and then in 1984, what Reagan did is what Trump is going to do, and that is pull in a tremendous amount of blue-collar workers who have felt abandoned by the Democrats.
Politicians need money at election time and money to get the vote. Well, more than half of money in election comes from corporate interests whose interests are in polluting the Chinese environment and making products.
As time has gone by, I have looked more and more like Paul Revere than the alarmist my critics have sought to portray.
The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years.
One of the goals of the Trump administration is to reclaim all of the supply chain and manufacturing capability that would otherwise exist if the playing field were level.
When you go to a political convention, the best place to spend time is at the numerous parties put on by lobbyists. And you don't go for food. You go to beg for money.
Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.
The way the textbook works is you have gains from trade that should be distributed across all the trading partners. As soon as one bad actor like China massively cheats, they win at the expense of us; they win at the expense of Europe, and over time, it threatens the entire integrity of the global financial system and the global trading system.
It does the American economy no long-term good to only keep the big box factories where we are now assembling 'American' products that are composed primarily of foreign components. We need to manufacture those components in a robust domestic supply chain that will spur job and wage growth.
We envision a more Germany-style economy, where 20 percent of our workforce is in manufacturing. And we're not talking about banging tin in the back room. We're talking about high technology across the board, whether it's computer chips or cars or anything in between.
It doesn't matter to me who's the most powerful or profitable country in the world. All countries want to be prosperous. What's happening is a zero-sum game between China and the U.S., where their gain is our loss.
Let me say right off the bat that I'm not what you would call a 'tree hugger' or a 'bushes and bunnies' environmentalist out to save the planet or the whales - although I do not denigrate that perspective either, and I really like whales.
In my life, I'm an expert on a few things. Losing close elections is one of them. Electric utility regulation is another. Neither is a barrel of laughs, but both have their moments.
For those of you who still believe in the Easter Bunny and that the letters that appear in your local newspaper come from concerned citizens who really care, I've got troubling news. At least in politics, most of the letters that get published on the letters-to-the-editor page originate in the campaign headquarters of the candidates.
It's that evil twin part of me that always comes out at the absolute wrong political moment, like a demon possessing my soul; it exhibits itself as an arrogance or disdain or obnoxiousness or meanness or anger or pettiness - all traits that are lethal in politics.
It never was because of my positions or policies that people refused to vote for me. In fact, most people agreed with my policy agenda. Rather, the problem was my personality.
If there is one good thing I can say about the Republicans, it is that they are generally better than Democrats at putting the interests of their party above the interests of any one of its members.
I don't know why so many people in America hate Hillary Clinton; I found her to be one of the most gracious, intelligent, perceptive, and, yes, classy women I have ever met.
Never, ever cheat, especially yourself, even if you are absolutely, positively sure that you can get away with it.
Manufacturing is the seed corn for other jobs in the U.S.
The greatest compliment is I am accused of being a Dem leftie and a Republican righty. I am a pragmatist. I call it as I see it.
The best way to lift people out of poverty and boost wages is to grow our GDP faster. While Trump is open to raising the minimum wage, the best approach is to grow faster.
A city should decide where it doesn't want to develop, saving at least some of the canyons and hillsides and wetlands from the bulldozer's blade.
The last thing a Trump administration plans is a trade war. The issue simply is getting a decent trade deal with each of the major trading partners.
Foreigners will eventually own so much of America that there will be nothing left to trade.
Trump will give you the robust bull: 25,000 on the Dow in the first term.
We're going right down the toilet, and it's a made-in-China toilet.
The far more likely Trump scenario is this: Chinese leaders realize they no longer have a weak leader in the White House; China ceases its unfair trade practices. America's massive trade deficit with China comes peacefully and prosperously back into balance, and both the U.S. and Chinese economies benefit from trade.
The American people have been kicked in the teeth by unfair trade for decades.
My fellow economists and academics fail to understand the economics of trade in the real world. Traditional models of academia respect free trade without considering whether it is fair trade.
