Why Trump’s Victory Matters, and Why It Doesn’t

Donald Trump is the projected winner of the 2024 presidential election. After winning back states he had lost in 2020, Trump performed well in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—states Kamala Harris needed to win. Trump has won more than enough electoral votes to win back the White House and, as of early Wednesday morning, is projected to win the popular vote.

Republicans have also retaken control of the Senate. Control over the House of Representatives is still up for grabs but, so far, Republicans are on pace to take that too.

Trump’s win represents another major and well-deserved repudiation of the Washington establishment. In 2016, Republican voters decisively rejected Jeb Bush—the establishment’s chosen GOP candidate—and sent Donald Trump to the White House on a refreshingly anti-establishment platform.

While he largely governed like an establishment Republican in his first term, his occasionally anti-establishment rhetoric was enough to prompt a full-court press from the political class to first force him out of office and later to disqualify him from ever holding power again. In the realm of public opinion, the establishment’s chosen tactic was to label Trump a racist, misogynist, wanna-be fascist whose supporters back him simply because they hate everyone who isn’t straight, white, and male.

As Murray Rothbard wrote in a controversial, but prescient essay back in 1992, the modern Washington establishment has shown a robust willingness to excuse and even side with explicit racists. They aren’t actually appalled or offended by off-color jokes and statements. They just recognize that it’s easier to get regular, everyday Americans upset about those things than the rhetoric that truly worries those in power—in this case, Trump’s honesty about how Washington screws the public over and his skepticism about the need to fight all these wars.

The fact that Trump won again, after eight years of relentless demonization from those in power, is arguably an even bigger loss for the establishment than 2016.

It is certainly a bad outcome for the establishment media. The Trump campaign made a very explicit choice to engage more with alternative media than any other campaign in history. Trump sat for hours-long interviews on some of the biggest podcasts and internet talk shows, bringing his message to millions of listeners in a conversational setting—the opposite of short, scripted sound bites. Meanwhile, the establishment was freaking out about newspapers not printing formal Harris endorsements.

The establishment media is quickly losing relevance in our media environment, and this election result confirms that.

Still, there are plenty of reasons to be worried about Trump’s second term.

For one, there is clearly an effort by some neoconservatives and establishment Republicans to again co-opt Trump’s presidency. Trump, for his part, will probably be happy to bask in calling himself a winner while delegating the actual work to establishment figures who actually oppose many of the policies that make Trump popular with the American people.

Trump is also explicitly bad on a number of issues—like his hawkishness toward China and Iran and his call for more government barriers to trade. And because these positions would grant more power and money to the political class, the prospect of them coming to fruition is far more likely than his better positions.

There is also what has often been dubbed the “only Nixon could go to China” effect, where nominally right-wing politicians have an easier time enacting left-wing policies, and vice-versa. For instance, Trump significantly escalated Obama’s policy and sent lethal aid to Ukraine back in his first term, in part to counter the establishment’s campaign to define him as a Russian puppet. Without vigilant, bottom-up pressure from the public, Trump could easily be worse on some issues than Harris would have been.

Still, there is value in the American people again repudiating the political establishment by voting for a candidate they had clearly deemed unacceptable. If Trump can follow through on his promises to end the war in Ukraine, appoint a libertarian to his cabinet, and finally free Ross Ulbricht, and if he greenlights Elon Musk’s plan to start a government efficiency department with Ron Paul, then this election will prove to have been even more consequential.

With all that said, however, it’s important to keep perspective and not get too carried away by all the focus on this one victory. The unfortunate fact is that some of the most significant issues facing the American people were not featured at all in this election cycle.

The most frustrating example is all the damage caused by the Federal Reserve. As Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and countless other economists in the same tradition have explained, when supposedly independent central banks like the Fed print new money and transfer it to the big banks and other politically-connected groups, it transfers the public’s wealth to the political class through inflation and traps us in a never-ending cycle of recessions.

Further, the federal government’s use of money printing allows them to hide and delay the cost of government programs. All the worst things Washington is currently doing to us and to people abroad are only politically possible because of the Fed.

The price inflation our government forces on us is not only a blatant transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the politically-connected rich, it has incredibly damaging impacts on our culture. Thanks to Fed-induced permanent price inflation, people are encouraged to take on debt and be more shortsighted and reductionist in their economic decisions, firms become artificially big, the consumption of stuff takes priority over the cultivation and production of resources, the quality of our elites and leaders diminishes, and generosity recedes out of community life.

As if that’s not enough, the political establishment has used its ability to conceal the cost of its programs in inflation and debt to build a massive military-industrial complex. The political class has spent the past eighty years finding and creating new enemies abroad to justify all the power centralized in and money spent on the war-making apparatus in Washington, DC.

Eight decades of military engagements, proxy wars, and arming allies has been lucrative for federal bureaucrats, beltway “national security” experts, and weapons companies. But it’s come at the expense, not only of the American public’s economic well-being, but our actual security.

Today, the world is full of groups—ranging from remote bands of terrorists to nuclear-armed governments—that consider Americans their enemy thanks to foreign interventions conducted by our government that were completely unnecessary. Now, rather than admit their role in bringing about these dangerous conditions, the political class is using our perilous global moment to justify more foreign interventions.

That same cycle where the government creates problems with interventions that are then used to justify more interventions is at work in countless other areas, such as the cost and quality of healthcare, the price of college, the affordability of housing, and more. And again, much of this is enabled and exacerbated by the Federal Reserve system.

All of these are major issues that have serious impacts on the well-being of the American people. Yet they received little to no mention this election season. Inflation was mentioned a lot by both campaigns, but the rhetoric never touched on the true cause and only solution. Trump, to his credit, did have some good moments speaking out against “forever wars” and promising to end the war in Ukraine. But his stance on Iran and China was often even more hawkish than the Washington establishment.

The full context of the interventionist scheme creating and profiting off of the problems facing us at home and abroad was either not understood or intentionally ignored by both campaigns.

The Washington establishment suffered an embarrassing defeat last night, and that’s reason to celebrate. But until the public comes to truly understand how they use central banking and interventionism to enrich themselves at our expense, the good that can come from elections remains frustratingly limited. It’s up to those of us who do to get to work.

Image Source: Wiki Commons
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

 


What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

 


Originally Posted at https://mises.org/


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Chinese Agent Who Tried To Bribe IRS Against Shen Yun Sentenced To 20 Months in Prison

Chinese Agent Who Tried To Bribe IRS Against Shen Yun Sentenced To 20 Months in Prison

Authored by Eva Fu and Cara Ding via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Chinese agent who tried to bribe the IRS and manipulate the agency into advancing Beijing’s transnational repression of a U.S. nonprofit has received a 20-month prison sentence.

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains on Jov. 19, 2024. Cara Ding/The Epoch Times

U.S. citizen John Chen, 72, was a principal actor in a $50,000 bribery scheme under the direction of a Chinese intelligence official to revoke the nonprofit status of New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts.

Shen Yun has long been on the Chinese regime’s target list. Founded in 2006, the company tours around the world to display the ancient Chinese culture that prevailed before the communist takeover of China, while highlighting the human rights abuses under the regime’s rule. It has often drawn attention to the ongoing persecution of the meditation group Falun Gong.

Chen pleaded guilty in July after reaching a plea deal with prosecutors. He has spent the 16 months since his arrest in May 2023 in detention, and he will spend another four months in federal custody.

He will also forfeit $50,000 and face three years of supervised release after serving the full prison term.

For several months in 2023, Chen had been trying to move a fraudulent whistleblower complaint to help the Chinese Communist Party “topple” Falun Gong, according to court documents. Prosecutors said the whistleblower complaint was “facially deficient” and invoked propaganda rhetoric typical of Chinese authorities.

During those conversations, Chen emphasized that Chinese leadership was “very generous” in financial support for the plan, according to the court filing.

After this-this-this thing is done,” the court document quoted Chen as saying, “reward for work will surely be given at that time.

Chen and another co-conspirator, Lin Feng, who served 16 months of detention, paid $5,000 cash bribes to an undercover agent posing as an IRS agent. They promised an additional $50,000 for opening an investigation along with 60 percent of any awards from the complaint if it went through.

It was “a significant bribe,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard said at the sentencing hearing. He noted that the undercover officer didn’t specify an amount.

John Chen (L) poses for a photo at an event celebrating the 70th anniversary of Chinese communist rule in Beijing in 2019. Department of Justice

“The defendant chose the amount,” he said.

Both Chen and Lin had traveled to Orange County in upstate New York, where Shen Yun is based, to surveil Falun Gong practitioners there, according to a court filing.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the sentencing was a reminder that “the U.S. justice system will hold accountable those who attempt to engage in malicious transnational repression on American soil.”

“John Chen aligned himself with the PRC government and its goals to harass and intimidate the Falun Gong, a long-standing target of PRC repression. In doing so, Chen boldly attempted to bribe an individual he believed to be an IRS agent to corrupt the administration of the U.S. tax code and pervert the IRS whistleblower program,” he said in a statement on Nov. 19. “This Office will not tolerate efforts like this to repress free speech by targeting critics of the PRC in the United States.”

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams addresses the media in New York City on Nov. 2, 2023. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Both Chen’s son and his lawyer declined to comment after walking out of the courtroom.

While Chen’s son, three China-based siblings, two ex-wives, and fiancée have all written letters asking for leniency and describing him as a man who loves the United States, the prosecutors disagreed.

In a Nov. 5 memo, they argued that a 30-month prison sentence—the longest under the sentencing guideline—would be appropriate because of the seriousness of the case and the need to deter criminal conduct, “particularly in cases of a foreign power’s repression of a disfavored group within the borders of the United States.”

“The defendant has no mitigating motives or external factors justifying his offense,” the prosecutors wrote, noting that Chen was “not motivated by poverty” and that there was no evidence of Chinese officials’ pressure.

The curtain call for Shen Yun Performing Arts at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City on Jan 11, 2015. Larry Dai/Epoch Times

Prosecutors noted that Chen had repeatedly referred to Chinese officials as his “friends” and that during the bribery scheme, he “called them ‘blood brothers,’ and described how ‘we’—Chen and his PRC Government friends—‘started this fight’ against the founder of the Falun Gong ‘twenty, thirty years ago.’”

The memo displayed photos obtained from Chen’s electronic devices and online accounts showing him at a major military parade in Beijing celebrating the 70th anniversary of Chinese communist rule in 2019. Another photo showed Chen shaking hands with communist leader Xi Jinping.

“Chen was extraordinarily proud of his history with the PRC Government and, in particular, his meeting with Xi,” the memo states, citing a recorded call in which he bragged that he had “climbed, climbed, climbed to this position,” and that “Uncle Xi” met him “three times in 10 years.”

Chen had also featured those three meetings, along with a photo, in a 2020 digital résumé, according to the memo.

Chen was aligned with the Chinese authorities in suppressing Falun Gong and “acted as a full-fledged and enthusiastic participant in the crimes,” the prosecutors said.

“It was his fight,” Lockard said at the sentencing hearing, adding that Chen had tried to use the freedoms he enjoyed in the United States to undermine the country.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/21/2024 – 23:25

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