Confessions

I do New Year resolutions.  I write them down and look at them at the end of the year.  In 2018, I actually nailed or at least came close on a number of them (one of which being to do 52 blog posts no matter what). 

This year, two of my resolutions are to listen more carefully to people with different political leanings, and critically examine my own judgments, especially when they have been incorrect.

As to the second, I want to work harder at identifying where I have taken a wrong turn and why.  One of my intellectual heroes is Eugene Fama.   When anomalies turn up in his models, he changes his theories and upends his models. 

So, here are my top 3:

1.      Mitt Romney.  I supported Mitt in the 2012 election, not because I was enthusiastic about him, but I was pretty much uniformly opposed to Barack Obama’s policies.  Yet Mitt’s “47%” comment, “There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent on government, who believe they are victims….These are people who pay no income tax…and so my job is not to worry about these people”  was politically suicidal and foreshadowed Hillary’s Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” comment.  Mitt ran a terrible campaign, could not connect with the common person,  and now we see the real Mitt, publishing an op-ed lambasting Trump’s character just months after asking for Trump’s support.  Romney will never be president and should not be.  The op-ed triggered a backlash that apparently caught Romney by surprised and he ended up training to explain himself—which is why he is not president.  He was always explaining.

      Romney’s op-ed could have been written by any of the Trump bashing columnists at the New York Times.  Except for one small paragraph in which he conceded that “not all of the president’s policies have been misguided” and ended with the usual litany of accusations hurled by CNN, MSNBC, WaPo or the NYT, “I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest, or destructive to democratic institutions.”  He did not have Nancy Pelosi, Corey Booker or Rashidi Tlaib in mind when he wrote those words.  It was a mistake to support Romney, and if Romney tries to primary Trump, count me with the 47% that will not vote for him.

2.      The Iraq War.  Yes, I bought it and the rationale for it.  9/11 and Saddam’s cat and mouse game persuaded me that he was likely to have a WMD program and there was little doubt that he would seek eventually seek retribution against the U.S. if he did.  Desert Storm’s success convinced me that it would be a quick war and that we would be able to impose some sort of democratic, if imperfect regime there.  I failed to recall that we were best off when Iraq and Iran were too busy beating the heck out of each other to bother with us or Israel much.  Not only did we not get the results we wanted, our foes were no longer scared of us.  We taught them how to turn an amazing 100 hour techno war into a long stalemate.  It was a costly venture that cost us moral authority and prestige along with thousands dead and wounded.   As I posted a couple of weeks ago, despite the response from conservatives and liberals alike, getting our military presence out of the Middle East entirely is not an irrational policy choice on Trump’s part.  The Iraq and Afghanistan engagements taught us the limits of military solutions (apparently a lesson not learned by Hillary Clinton as she pushed to depose Gaddafi.

3.      China.  I wasn’t alone in this one.  I was indoctrinated in the benefits of free trade, and I still adhere to that view.  And generally, the numbers support a free trade regimen.  Since Nixon’s opening with China, world poverty has declined from 44% to less than 10% today.  As with the Iraq War, the premise that as China grew richer, a middle class would emerge and demand more individual freedom turned out to be false.  As late as the fall of 2016, even Eugene Fama was convinced of that.   In fact, the reverse has happened.  Xi became president for life.  The regime is committing terrible human rights abuses against the Uighers and is now threatening Taiwan.  I will have a full blog post or two later in the year on China, but suffice it to say that our hopes that China would evolve into a more liberal and more democratic state have not been realized.  In fact, it’s going in the other direction.

       Last summer when I had lunch with economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, she said of the tariffs imposed on China, “It’s just stupid.”  And from her point of view, a purely economic one, she is correct.  But this is a narrow view, I believe.  I heard University of Chicago political science professor John Mersheimer speak last summer.   Once sentence stuck with me—“You do not want China to become rich.” 

I will have more to say on China in later blog posts, but China is NOT a normal trading partner.  While reasonable minds can disagree with whether the tariffs Trump has leveled are the correct tactic, but previous administrations have not gotten their attention.

Those, I think, were the bigger ones.  I’m sure there were smaller ones and there will be more in the future, but owning up to the ones you do make will hopefully improve your batting average in the future.