Monday, April 7, 2025

Part I

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How Much Financial Pain? How Much Gain? Trump’s Tariffs Raise Big Economic Questions

Well, it’s Monday, and we’re about to find out how the financial markets and others are responding to the recently announced tariffs by President Donald Trump. This is turning out to be a bigger story than many people expected, and perhaps even a bigger story than the president intended. That’s hard to say.

When you look at the issue of tariffs, this has been a consistent preoccupation on the part of Donald Trump, going back for decades. As he pointed out himself over the weekend, he has been completely consistent about his belief in tariffs. He has been very consistent about the fact that he sees a trade deficit as unfair to the United States and sees the United States and U.S. workers as being taken advantage of when it comes to many others in the world, other nations, other markets, and in particular, the loss of jobs in the United States, with many of those jobs going overseas, where labor rates are less. But we need to take a step back and look at this, because I mentioned last week, when the tariffs were announced, that this kind of proposal, given the complexity of world markets, is sort of like just throwing marbles on the table. And they may end up where you want them, or more of them than not may end up where you want them, but it’s really very unpredictable.

And the interactions in a complex economy, not only in the world stage, but just here in the United States, those complexities are so complicated that it’s going to be very difficult to know even for a matter of time how this is going to work out. The president’s play is long-term. At least he says that his play is long-term. What would that play be? Well, let’s think about it.

His concern, going all the way back for decades, is that in the neoliberal transformation of the economy towards free markets, it meant that an enormous number of jobs went overseas. Is that right or wrong? Absolutely right. That entire industries went overseas, absolutely right. It’s hard to find any firm in the United States that can make a major seagoing vessel.

Shipbuilding in the United States is basically all gone. Many other industries basically gone. Even President Biden, during his term, sounded the alarm about the silicon chip business, being basically overseas, leaving the United States very exposed. President Trump has been primarily concerned about the movement of jobs, and also about the trade imbalance. Now, the balance of trade is a very interesting thing, because Americans, we also have to understand, have grown very accustomed to this balance of trade, and at least in large part, Americans like it.

Americans don’t like the idea of jobs going overseas, especially well-paying jobs, and that’s why the labor unions are kind of divided on this issue. They don’t like a lot about President Trump’s policies, but at least when it comes to a union like the United Auto Workers, they’re basically in favor of tariffs, but they also have to recognize that if indeed the tariffs work and there’s this massive turnaround with jobs coming from overseas, that’s going to be a multi-year process. That’s not something that can happen quickly. It’s not like you can walk into an abandoned building, and all of a sudden turn it into a modern, say, automobile or vehicle assembly building. That’s going to take a lot of capital, it’s going to take a lot of time.

Furthermore, capital is only invested where people have confidence in the long-term strategy. Here’s one of the biggest problems. President Trump is now just a few months into his second term in office, and that means he can’t count upon a continuation of his policies after he leaves office. That election coming up in 2028 seems a long way off. In a lot of ways, we just need to recognize it’s going to come in a hurry.

It always does. That’s the way this works, and especially in a second term, the president’s meter is running. The meter on his term is running, and the president knows that he’s got another meter, or you could say two other meters, and that is the two houses of Congress, because right now, President Trump can look to Congress and he has a Republican majority in the house, very narrow, and a Republican majority in the Senate, quite significant, but you’re looking at not only the differences between the White House and Congress, you’re looking at the differences between even under Republican control, the House and the Senate. This isn’t as easy as it looks. And given the midterm elections, it could get a lot harder.

The President has said that his aim in the tariffs is a revitalization of the American economy, and a resettlement of the arrangements in terms of international trade. He sees this at present being to the disadvantage of the United States. Other nations have tariffs against U.S. goods, thus he calls for a reciprocal tariff, but his tariff strategy is a lot larger than that, and that honestly is what has shocked Wall Street and others. It’s a far more ambitious plan or policy that was announced by the President last week, and we are still not sure of the entirety of where the president intends to go. But over the weekend, the stock market lost about $6 trillion of value.

That’s one of the biggest crashes over time in the stock market’s history. You have to go back to the COVID epidemic to find some kind of parallel. Now, you look at COVID and you say, “Well, there was a recovery.” Yes, but that took time, and a lot of people are looking at their investment portfolios, and something like 60% of Americans have a direct interest in those investments that are basically located in the financial markets. You look at that, and a lot of Americans are going into a little bit of panic, or at least a lot of nervousness, and one of the big reasons is because the president has basically talked in terms of two strategies, and at least what we need to recognize is that taking at face value, these nullify each other.

They’re contradictory. You really can’t do both of these. On the one hand, the president has said steadfastly that his tariffs policy isn’t going to change. He said that it just isn’t going to change. He’s going to stand by the policy.

It’s a long-term plan, and that means that the tariffs would remain in place for a long time, because it’s going to take a long time for those economic incentives and motivations to work, whereby, for example, you’d have the reopening of factories or the opening of new factories in the United States, jobs coming back. That’s going to take quite a bit of time, and it’s going to require an awful lot of pain in the economy. The president says, “A little bit of pain now for gain later.” He is at least indicating that’s part of his strategy. But the other thing the president said is that he is looking at this as leverage for a negotiation with foreign countries in order that their policies might be changed, and then if they change the policies, the tariffs would go away.

Well, the problem is you can’t do both of those things at the same time. You can’t keep the tariffs and make them go away. If the tariffs are a short-term negotiating strategy, then if the negotiations are successful, the tariffs go away, and there’s going to be huge pressure on the White House for that. Pressure coming from foreign governments, absolutely. Pressure coming from Congress, absolutely.

Pressures coming from within his administration, absolutely. Pressures coming from the market, oh, absolutely. And that means just common Americans, looking at their financial situation, looking at rising prices because inflation is almost assuredly going to come. The president basically, or members of his administration basically acknowledge that because the tariffs basically amount to a tax that will eventually be paid by someone. If the price of importing the product goes up, eventually the companies may absorb some of that for a while, but eventually, it’s going to get to the consumer.

In any event, the companies are going to deal with increased costs, and that’s going to relate to wage, wage growth, employment rates, all the rest. All of this is interconnected. That’s why I talk about the marbles on the table. They’re going in all kinds of different directions. Economists have theories about why, and economists have theories about what, and I think clearly, some of those economists are a lot more insightful than others.

But the point is, this is way too complex. That is one of the key insights of F.A. Hayek, a major economic thinker of the 20th century, who pointed out that there are just too many complicated independent factors in the economy to do central planning, the way, for example, the liberals in some countries have tried to do in the West, and it was the very essence of the communist regimes, trying to do economic planning. And as Hayek made very clear, you just don’t have enough information, and by the way, it’s changing all the time. Consumers respond to price, or scarcity, or abundance with decisions, and you can’t factor all of that in. You don’t even know what they all mean at the time.

I do understand, I think a lot of the president’s frustration, a very long frustration, as he said for about 30 years. And as a matter of fact, over the weekend, he said it’s one of the most consistent beliefs he has held politically. And that’s documentable. He has been making those comments all the way back on an early edition of The View decades ago. He has seen this as fundamentally unfair, he points to the loss of American jobs, and he sees the trade deficit as a moral issue, as something that is wrong against the United States.

The problem with that is that Americans do like the low prices. When you look at the bargain that Americans have made, and I realize Americans didn’t make this by sitting down saying, “Hey, this is a bargain we’re going to make,” they made it by–I’m going to go back to F.A. Hayek–they made it by millions upon millions upon millions of economic decisions that add up over time. In other words, they decided to do business in big boxes like Walmart, where they want things made overseas cheap.

They want the cheaper bicycle, as I often use as an illustration. Bicycles are just one classic example of how the economy has been transformed. In constant dollars, the bicycle I rode as a kid would be hundreds of dollars, just a simple bicycle, except for the fact it’s no longer made in a domestic bicycle factory. It’s now made overseas. The labor costs are really, really low. They have automated a great deal of it.

By the time it comes to the United States, they can sell it in Walmart for about $100 or less. That’s just an amazing thing. Americans pretty much are counting on that. The President isn’t wrong that other nations have taken advantage of the United States, but the United States and U.S. consumers have also taken advantage of a situation that has afforded them lower prices, and frankly, an abundance of goods available from just about anywhere in the world. That comes right down to what we eat and what we just take for granted as an economic reality.

The reality is that tariffs are going to come with a cost. All that money, the president’s talking about, untold billions of dollars, that is going to eventually be paid. Foreign nations don’t pay it, they may end up, in effect, subsidizing, in some sense, those tariffs, but it’s eventually something that is going to be borne by the consumer. The president has said there will be short-term pain. The question is, “Politically, how much pain the American people will take, or how much panic the markets will sustain?”

The reality is no president can stand fundamentally against the markets in terms of long-term pressure. It just doesn’t work. And I want to tell you one of the reasons it doesn’t work. It’s not even basically political, it is just economic. And that is because when you look at the people who are invested in the market, it is not just fat cat multi-billionaires, it is also public school teachers.

It is small-time American shops. It is all kinds of Americans, including those in labor unions and those, quite frankly, just living a middle class existence who have 401(k)s and other investments in the market, and the loss of multiple trillions of dollars in one weekend, it’s going to get the attention of the American people. The President says, “Calm down, trust me,” and he is just asking for a lot of trust. It’s going to be very interesting to see how that works out in terms of the response of the American people. His administration includes many people who’ve changed their tune on this issue, and maybe that’s because they’ve come to a different set of convictions given the facts, and at least a part of that has to do with experience over time.

If you’re not learning in experience over time, there’s something wrong with you. On the other hand, the question is, “How do the markets respond? How do consumers respond? How do voters respond?” And long-term, a political party that doesn’t give attention to answering those questions well isn’t in power.

A point made by Kentucky Senator, Rand Paul, when he simply pointed out that this kind of effort in the past has led to electoral disaster for Republicans. So a very interesting observation as we close this for right now, and that is that this clearly is a deep belief of President Donald Trump. He clearly believes in what he’s doing here. This is not a short-term tactic, this is a long-term strategy. And he also can honestly say, “I kept talking about this during my first term. I’ve been talking about this for decades, and I talked about it a lot in the run-up to the 2024 election.” One of the questions is, “Was his own base listening to that?” 

In moral terms, it’s going to be very, very interesting to see as a test of leadership, how much pain the American people are willing to take with the promise of a trade gain, or to put it more personally, how much pain are individual Americans willing to take in their 401(k), or at the checkout in the supermarket? If anything, those are questions that are more urgent, and at least in the short-term, they’re certainly more easily answered.

Part II

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A Collision Between Secularism and the LGBTQ Revolution: A Leader of New Atheism Goes After the Freedom From Religion Foundation for Abandoning Biology

Okay, in worldview terms, something really big has happened over the course of the last several months. It came to a head with a piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal by Jerry A. Coyne. He is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. It was entitled “Losing My Nonreligion.” It is a fascinating story. Jerry Coyne is one of the most assertive atheists in public life in America today.

He has written books including Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, he has been a major figure in the new atheism, and he has been a major figure in the group known as the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has served on that organization’s advisory board, and as far back as 2011, that organization gave him, no joke, this is the name of the prize, “The Emperor Has No Clothes Award.” In other words, he’s a big-time atheist, who was celebrated by other big-time atheists. And speaking of big-time atheists, Richard Dawkins from Britain, and Steven Pinker here in the United States, have joined him in resigning from this organization in outrage toward what they have done. In taking down an article by Jerry Coyne, he wrote the article in response to another article that appeared at one of the websites for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and that was entitled “What Is A Woman?,” written by an individual named Kat Grant.

And I’m not going to take a long look at the article, but the argument is easy to understand. This particular writer, in a scientific context and atheistic scientific context, argues that when you ask the question, “What is a woman?” well, let me just get to the last line, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” So in other words, this isn’t about biology, this isn’t about male, female, it’s not about genetics, it is about state of mind. It is the gender non-binary right there in a scientific website, as it carries something like the endorsement of a supposedly scientific organization, or at least an atheist organization with a lot of very prominent scientists in it, including some of the most famous in the world, and they were very offended.

Now, Jerry Coyne wrote a response. Again, one of the most well-known atheist evolutionary scholars in the United States. His response was published, but then it was taken down by the organization. In other words, the LGBTQ agenda is more powerful in this supposedly freethinking, scientifically inclined organization than, say, science. So just remember the argument to which Jerry Coyne was responding is a question as to, “Who is a woman?”

And you know what? If you’re committed to biology, you’re going to have to give a biological answer to that question, but it turns out that a lot of people who are claiming to be committed to biology are actually a lot more committed to the LGBTQ revolution. And by the way, the strict enforcement of that revolution, Jerry Coyne’s article was taken down. In his article, he made very clear that biology is very clear. There are two and only two genders, or two and only two sexes, that is male and female, and there is no negotiating that truth.

Coyne was, of course, responding to that article that it appeared, asking the question, “What is a woman?,” ending up with, “A woman is whoever she says she is.” Jerry Coyne then writes, “I wrote a rebuttal, Biology Is Not Bigotry, which the Freedom From Religion Foundation published in late December, but the woke care more about progressive ideology than scientific facts, and within a day, the FRF took down my article and issued a statement, asserting the publication of my piece was an error of judgment, that it does not reflect our principles or values, that it had caused distress, and that the FFRF,” again, the Freedom From Religion Foundation stands, “Firmly with the LGBTQIA+ community.” Well, they just said right out front, right out there for everyone what they believe. They believe in LGBTQIA+, plus, plus, plus, plus. Biology is going to have to take a back seat.

That’s the problem. When you look at the argument made by so many pushing evolution, and that includes Jerry Coyne, along with many others, Richard Dawkins, very famous prophet of the so-called New Atheism, they were making the point that biology makes clear, they said, that there is an order. It is a reproductive order. It is a male and female order. And, of course, they did so–they thought–at the expense of Christianity, and in particular, the biblical doctrine of creation, and in particular, the understanding of the uniqueness of human beings, other than in just biological terms. Jerry Coyne has gone so far as to basically say that morality, an objective morality doesn’t exist. It’s simply something, of course, that’s not revealed because there’s no God to reveal it, so it is something that is negotiated, basically. In societal terms, and of course, behind this, in the biological sense, there’s a motive of reproduction of the species, which turns out to take on an outsize experience. Of course, that assumes you know what male and female is, because that, by the way, is still necessary for reproduction.

Now, I talked about this on The Briefing months ago, at that point in this particular controversy, but Jerry A. Coyne, he’s coming out swinging, so to speak, in the Wall Street Journal, and that tells you this is still a live issue. He goes at transgender ideology. Listen to this, “In many ways, transgender ideology is no different from the religious dogma, the FFRF was founded to oppose. It insists on doctrines that are probably untrue, ‘trans women are women,’ engages in circular reasoning, ‘a woman is whoever she says she is,’ and affirms mind-body dualism, your self-concept is more real than your actual sex.” He goes on and uses theological language.

Listen to this. This is an anti-theologian, but he’s using theological language. “It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy, tarring of dissenters as transphobes, attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter-arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics.” He mentions J. K. Rowling, for example. Now, I want to be clear, Jerry Coyne has not moved a millimeter towards Christianity.

He has not moved even slightly towards theism. But what he and some of his fellow very famous scientists in this group understood, is that many people who say they are all for science, they turn out to be all the more for, a very unscientific approach when it comes to something such as transgender identity, or even the larger LGBTQIA set of phenomena. And you’ll notice that Richard Dawkins has already been in trouble on this on the other side of the Atlantic. And by the way, if you do believe in biology, you’re going to be in trouble on this. As a matter of fact, if all you believe in is biology, you’re going to be in trouble on this.

I think it’s incredibly interesting that a newspaper, as influential as the Wall Street Journal, has decided just recently to run Coyne’s piece on this. And he goes right at so many of the, say, modern intellectual playthings of the age, and in particular, those that affirm the LGBTQ revolution. He goes on to say, “Biology is not bigotry,” an argument that is also used by many Christians. Of course, biology is not bigotry. He goes on and says this, “The FFRF has not only abandoned science, but suppressed discussion and argument about its decision.”

He says, “Given the organization’s embrace of quasi-religious and unscientific dogma, I’m proud to proclaim myself a heretic.” A heretic, in one of the, say, high churches of secularism. But he’s not any less secular than he ever was. He’s no less atheist than he ever was. He just understands that you can’t have male and female without, well, male and female, you mess that up. 

And by the way, if you’re an evolutionary scientist, everything falls apart because you don’t have any forward motion. The mechanism of human reproduction is basically confused and taken away, and once you start talking out loud in this way, guess what? You get canceled. In the case of Jerry Coyne, his article disappeared.

I wrote a piece on this for WORLD Opinions today, and I concluded that piece by saying, “Sadly, when it comes to Christianity, Coyne is just as much a heretic as he declares himself to be in terms of the modern LGBTQ orthodoxy.” But he’s a heretic in the Christian sense with infinitely more at stake. We can only hope that his affirmation of biological reality will be extended to theological reality. For that, we can hope, and on our side, we can pray. 

Part III

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Most of the World is Still Explicitly Theological: Taliban Leader Delivers Major Theological Challenge to the West

By the way, in conclusion, one of the big problems in terms of worldview is that a lot of people just don’t understand, and this is a particular problem for secularists in the Democratic West.

They do not understand that there are worldview preconditions that are necessary for anything like constitutional self-government to survive. That was understood, by the way, by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, the founders of our national experiment, but it’s also true in terms of the larger West, and it is seen in the collision between the West, shaped by Christianity and other parts of the world, shaped by, for example, Islam. And if you want to understand this, don’t ask a liberal Christian and a liberal Muslim to explain this because they’re part of the confusion, not the clarity. Every once in a while, clarity comes along. 

And in a small piece that was recently published just last week in the Wall Street Journal, a little piece, just at the bottom of the page tells us a lot about the clash of worldviews. The headline is “Sharia Gets Nod Over Western Law,” dateline to Afghanistan. So this is Sharia law. That’s Islamic law. And here’s the article, “Taliban leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada said there was no need for Western laws in Afghanistan, and that democracy was dead as long as Sharia laws are in effect.” He made the comments, says the Wall Street Journal, “In a sermon,” marking an Islamic holiday in the southern city of Kandahar’s Mosque, “There is no need for laws that originate from the West. We will create our own laws.”

Speaking in the local language, he also emphasized the importance of Islamic law. He said the previous Sunday, he had criticized the West, “Saying non-believers had united against Muslims and that the U.S. and others were united in their hostility towards Islam.” So you have liberals on both sides of this, trying to say, “Hey, there’s no problem. There’s no inherent conflict,” but you get an Orthodox believing Christian, and well, in this case, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and if anything, he does know what Islam is. And of course, there’s a lot going on here in terms of geopolitics, involvement by the Soviet Union, by the way, in Afghanistan, and then the involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, and the fight against Al-Qaeda, and the struggle with the Taliban and all the rest, but the resolute nature of Islam in that part of the world means that the Taliban clearly outlasted American efforts, and eventually, America withdrew leaving the Taliban in power, and the Taliban are theological.

They’re right up front about it. They’re unashamedly, unabashedly theological. And as Christians, we need to recognize a strong theological argument when we see it, and in particular, when it is addressed to us. An awful lot of the secularists in the world, and that includes some we were just discussing, an awful lot of them were absolutely certain, a matter of decades ago, that a strong religious faith would simply disappear from the planet. To say the least, that has not happened.

It’s not to say it hasn’t happened in some places at sometimes, particularly in elite levels and in academia in some other places, but you look at a little story like this at the bottom of the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, and it is a reminder of the fact that the world is still theological. There are untold billions of people in the world who aren’t taking their cues, and certainly are not shaping their worldview in ways that would be happily received by Western secularists. It also just reminds us that underneath just about every significant headline, there is a clash of worldviews. It’s at least partly our responsibility to see them and to understand them as best we can.