President Donald Trump has been widely accused of changing his mind; of reverting from one policy to its very opposite, and then back again.

MSN mentions in this regard: “Donald Trump’s ability to change his mind, backtrack, announce one thing and then its opposite, issue a powerful ultimatum and then retract.”

Here is another example; the Wall Street Journal condemns him as follows: “After Denouncing U.S. Intervention, Trump Topples Foreign Leaders.” This newspaper continues: “In front of a packed chamber of Arab political and business leaders last May, President Trump declared that the era of American-led regime change was over… For years, Trump denounced Washington’s ‘forever wars’ and warned against toppling foreign regimes by force…”

States MS Now: “Trump promised to end ‘regime change.’” Now he’s urging Iranians to topple their government.” But, after these leaders murdered some 30,000 people in cold blood, Donald Trump retracted, out of concern for their safety. See, you just can’t trust Trump to stick to his views.

According to the New York Times: “As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”

The Washington Post piles on: “Trump keeps changing his timeline for ending the Iran war. The president has repeatedly suggested that the conflict was nearing a conclusion while simultaneously escalating threats against Tehran.”

There is a very famous quote, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that is very apropos in this context: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That applies to President Trump, in spades.

Consider, first, tariffs. Now, to be sure, there is no economic case to be made on behalf of this mercantilist nonsense. Adam Smith wrote brilliantly about this bit of economic illiteracy. There are few issues upon which the entire economics profession is more united than its dismissal. One of the important reasons for the success of the US economy is that we constitute a gigantic free trade area. If tariffs could bring about prosperity, we should allow each state to set them up against all the others. They do this in Canada, which is one reason why they are relatively poor, despite a vast amount of natural resources, and a highly skilled labor force.

According to the New York Times: “As the president threatens to wipe out Iran and attacks the pope, even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”

The Washington Post piles on: “Trump keeps changing his timeline for ending the Iran war. The president has repeatedly suggested that the conflict was nearing a conclusion while simultaneously escalating threats against Tehran.”

There is a very famous quote, attributed to John Maynard Keynes, that is very apropos in this context: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That applies to President Trump, in spades.

Consider, first, tariffs. Now, to be sure, there is no economic case to be made on behalf of this mercantilist nonsense. Adam Smith wrote brilliantly about this bit of economic illiteracy. There are few issues upon which the entire economics profession is more united than its dismissal. One of the important reasons for the success of the US economy is that we constitute a gigantic free trade area. If tariffs could bring about prosperity, we should allow each state to set them up against all the others. They do this in Canada, which is one reason why they are relatively poor, despite a vast amount of natural resources, and a highly skilled labor force.

In boxing, if the head shots are not working, go to the belly. If that does not suffice, attack the opponent’s head, once again. Keep switching from the jab to the cross. The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Trump’s best laid plans were all fine and dandy, until the enemy reacted to the first few forays, that is, with their Hormuz tactic.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

It cannot be denied that at one moment, Donald Trump is threatening to blow Iran back into the stone age. At another point in time, he is offering a two-week pause, if this murderous regime shows some vestige of reason. When they do not, when they continue to insist upon their sovereign right to produce a nuclear weapon, he takes an altogether different tack. This is blameworthy? No, it is a reasonable response to different conditions.

Then there are his dealings with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. At one point, he called him out for the socialist that he is. But on another occasion, Donald Trump invited this communist to the White House. You can’t get more of a boomerang than that. Perhaps the president can charm the mayor out of pursuing economic policies that have led to disaster and impoverishment everywhere they have been tried. Just think of East and West Germany, North and South Korea. You can’t get more of an almost perfectly controlled experiment than that. Then there is the fact that a significant part of the Cuban population, and that of Venezuela under Maduro, has emigrated in response to the dirigisme economic policies imposed therein. Will Mamdani ever learn? Perhaps, with Trump’s different treatment of him upon these occasions. That is the behavior of a madman?

Has anyone ever heard of the good cop bad cop routine? It must work at least some of the time, otherwise it would not be employed in practically every police movie we have seen. Well, Mr. Donald employs both roles at different times, and is unfairly castigated for substituting one type of policy for another.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Nor can we ignore his numerous hirings and firings. Is he the first boss who has ever employed someone who looked to be a good candidate, but it did not work out later on? Hardly. Yet, Mr. Trump is roundly condemned to engaging in this practice and virtually no one else is so treated.

Then, too, Mr. Trump ran for office on a peace platform, promising no more endless wars. If what is now occurring in Iran is not a war, it is coming awfully close. Is this yet another instance of whimsical and erratic behavior? Superficially, yes. But a moment’s reflection will acknowledge that the world when he campaigned for the presidency is not exactly the one which we now occupy. Iran was begging for a war; and Donald, a nice fellow, complied.

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Have no other presidents ever changed their minds about anything? Bill Clinton declared that the era of Big Government was over, and then supported the minimum wage law, along with numerous other regulations. Did the mainstream media condemn him for fickleness or capriciousness? Not so that anyone would notice.

Originally posted here.

 

"[Observe] such meaningless phrases as 'production for use and not for profit.' ... Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing. This would be obvious if he put a potato in the ground today and dug up the same potato tomorrow; but it is all the same if he plants one potato and gets only one potato as a crop. His labour is wasted; then he must starve, or someone else must feed him, if he has no reserve from previous production. 

    "The objection to profit is as if a bystander, observing the planter digging his crop, should say: 'You put in only one potato and you are taking out a dozen. You must have taken them away from someone else; those extra potatoes cannot be yours by right.' If profit is denounced, it must be assumed that running at a loss is admirable. On the contrary, that is what requires justification. Profit is self-justifying."

~ Isabel Paterson, from her 1943 book The God of the Machine (p. 221).

Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right.

But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class.

– Fraser Myers

But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern?

And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push.

– Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech.

I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:

I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.

Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.

M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.

His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.

Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.

– Toby Young