Polemic, Not Analysis

Regarding current supply chain difficulties, Hawley says (as former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren was wont to say) that he has a plan for that. Writing last month in the New York Times, which finds such thinking congenial, Hawley said the federal government should permanently micromanage U.S. trade. Mimicking progressives, who advocate “transformative” policies for this and that, Hawley wants Washington to “fundamentally restructure” trade policy, which he apparently considers dangerously friendly to freedom.

The global trading system powered the astonishing enlargement of post-1945 U.S. prosperity. Hawley, however, believes the system is a “failure” because supply problems have accompanied the pandemic.

It is the basic responsibility of the United States government to do its best to keep us safe from enemies and from existential mistakes; thus, we have regulations. But there is no acknowledgment of this truth from Will; in his excitement at attacking Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Warren (D-MA), at equating extremists of both sides, he betrays a doctrinaire belief in the inadequacies of government, and in laissez-faire free trade to solve everything, that fails to recognize the downsides of same, such as the movement of well-paying jobs overseas, and now the dangers, made obvious by the pandemic, of long supply chains – as any military logistical expert could have told him.

And his historical element is ridiculous. The United States came out of World War II in the best shape of any of the participants, and intelligently built alliances through foreign aid; to suggest that prosperity, built on the shoulders of war and a business-oriented aggression, is the result of a global trade system is to participate in a fantasy rather than hard-nosed realism.

Thus, it’s really hard to take this column seriously – which may be a pity, in the face of Hawley’s well known extremism, an extremism which wrung cries of woe from Hawley’s own mentor, Senator Blount (R-MO).