The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.
Almost
daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university
economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that
the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.
Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter.
Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1
trillion deficit itself.
They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.
So,
the result of Trump's foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending
recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation--or
rather a return to stagflation--and likely little, if any, increase in
tariff revenue as trade volume declined.
Instead, recent data show
increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up.
Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The
supposedly "crashed" stock market reached historic highs.
Common-sense
Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy
was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather
than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and
surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading
rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?
Most
Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump's jawboning
had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and
at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the
United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business
optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up
huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to
lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?
Were
Trump's art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere
starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely
agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate
rather than punitive tariffs?
Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that
our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would
agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit
margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative
market entirely?
Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.
We
were told for four years that only "comprehensive immigration reform"
would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They
knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had
elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and
had no intention of enforcing existing laws.
When Trump promised
that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering
illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed.
But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal
immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a
prediction be wrong?
Those favoring a reduction in illegal
immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and
citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000
aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden
administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off
the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.
Indeed, once the
border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their
country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities
did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its
preferred status over illegal entry.
Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation--again to wide ridicule
from immigration "experts." But why would not a million illegal aliens
wish to return home "voluntarily"-- if they were given free flights, a
$1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal
entry once they arrived home?
Many of our national security
experts warned that taking out Iran's nuclear sites was a fool's errand.
It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It
would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing.
It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.
In
fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A
twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a
ceasefire, not a conflagration.
As for a big power standoff, World
War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the
Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle
Eastern oil produced?
Why would Russia--bogged down in Ukraine and
suffering nearly a million casualties--wish to mix it up in Iran, after
ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?
Russia
usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions
elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply
Iran's destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was
desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran
would likely again lose any imported replacements?
As for waves of
terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses
from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of
Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran's
side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they
were battling and losing to the Israelis?
Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and
left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely
killing few of the enemy?
As far as the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?
Prior
to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was
not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was
little need for any such preemptive action.
Then, post facto, the
same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely
damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat,
given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted)
surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an
Iranian nuclear bomb.
Was Trump really going to "blow up",
"destroy" or "cripple" NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when
his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting
their two percent of GDP defense spending promises?
Given two
ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump's past correct predictions about
the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of
an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Russian leader
Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump's first term, unlike the
three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn't NATO agree to
rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump's efforts both to bolster
the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?
Why
were our "scientific" pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential
elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts
in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the
police, transgender males competing in women's sports, and open borders
first born and nurtured?
Answer: the university, and higher education in general.
The
list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly
expanded. We remember the "51 intelligence authorities" who swore the
Hunter Biden laptop was "likely" cooked up by the Russians. Our best and
brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden's
multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation
spikes. Our global warming professors' past predictions should have
ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying
beachfront communities, including Barack Obama's two beachfront
multimillion-dollar estates.
Our legal eagles, after learning
nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele
dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years
that, by now, Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 "walls are
closing in" and "bombshell" indictments.
So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?
One,
our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee
universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of
institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation,
50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid
antisemitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment.
Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free
expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink
of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming
orthodoxies.
The degreed expert classes emerge from universities
whose faculties are 90-95 percent left-wing and whose administrations
are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is
not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a
brave few who are not.
Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no
longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer
empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his
orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable
counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite,
our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than
correct in their assessments -- if they in any small way helped Trump.
Three,
universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever
more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to
problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they
were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in
professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria,
given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on
disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.
The vast
endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign
enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of
dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral
smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how
isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.
But the public
has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a
mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could
not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out
the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not
professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in
their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.
Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators,
and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter
worthlessness.