The Libertarian Betrayal

[antineoETC]

For years, the U.S. government allowed cheap Chinese products – products manufactured in a Communist country by low-wage workers – to flood the American market, while Chinese tariffs effectively barred our products from the Chinese market. The result was the near-destruction of our manufacturing sector and the concomitant weakening of our economy, even as China boomed. Yet libertarians viewed these developments with equanimity.

FULL ARTICLE

Actually many of the cheap "Chinese" products flooding into the US were made in China by US companies that had relocated there to exploit its low-wage workers and poor environmental protection. If US workers had said "Don't go! We'll work for even less than the Chinese", those factories would have stayed in the US. There is a noticeable cognitive dissonance on the US political right - eager to stoke anti-China sentiment in the American public - regarding greedy American capitalists' role in making China what it is today.

[antineoETC]

From above-linked article:

..both writers[referred to] proceed to do a lot of hand-wringing about Trump’s immigration policies, keeping up the standard libertarian pretense of caring about immigrants (including illegal aliens) when their real concern is for employers out to suppress wages.

In fact the whole neoliberal project of economic globalization was undertaken for THE VERY PURPOSE of suppressing wages globally for the benefit of a multinational global elite who have more loyalty to each other than to any nation state and its ordinary citizens. According to neoliberal ideology the only legitimate role of national governments is to provide the most business-friendly environment to attract inward investment eg by, as Thatcher and Reagan did in their respective countries, destroying the power of the Labor unions to keep wages up by industrial action. Margaret Thatcher, of course, destroyed the UK coal industry leaving her country to import "cheaper" coal from abroad.For all his use of tariffs, Trump subscribes to the neoliberal view that the role of government is to "get off the back" of business by, for instance, giving capitalists carte-blanche to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink.