Some really bad ideas

Sometimes bad ideas can be declared such only after the results roll in (for example, public housing projects, the 1938 Munich agreement, and communism); others can be proclaimed bad from the outset, to the point where it is difficult to figure out how any intelligent person could support them.

Here are some recent examples of the latter:

• Donald Trump’s steel tariffs.

Leave it to Trump to find a way to undermine the economic growth that might bolster his and

Republicans’ otherwise dismal political fortunes.

Just about anything that impedes the flow of goods and services across nation-state borders is bad, because it would be essentially a tax upon consumers and an additional cost for producers.

Such protectionism never works; at best it merely props up inefficient domestic industries for a time before they go under anyway. For every job temporarily saved, more and better jobs are lost (or never created) and consumers pay higher costs for products.

Since Trump doesn’t read books, or apparently much of anything, he probably doesn’t know what the Tariff Act of 1930 (“Smoot-Hawley”) was and how it helped turn what should have been a temporary economic downturn into a decadelong Great Depression.

• A proposal before the New Mexico state legislature that would require all of the state’s high school juniors to apply to college.

Let’s be honest here — we aren’t sending too few young people to college these days; we’re sending too many.

Only a small percentage of a typical high school graduating class has the capability and interest to do rigorous college work; which means that there are already millions of young people out there wasting their time and parent’s money (or piling up debt they can’t pay off) in pursuit of diplomas that signify little to nothing, based on a misguided assumption that you are somehow a failure in life if you don’t go to college.

College isn’t for everyone; and, if it was, it would no longer be college.

• Weakening tenure in the University of Arkansas system:

It is unclear what can be done about the alarming lack of ideological diversity in higher education, but the notion that we can limit the influence of “tenured radicals” by getting rid of the tenured part will almost certainly make matters worse rather than better.

At present, tenure and the freedom of intellectual inquiry and expression that it fosters actually helps to protect the few conservatives and libertarians in academe who could otherwise be terminated by administrators for failing to follow the politically correct party line.

Weaken tenure and you will likely get even more ideological conformity and less genuine education at such places.

• The concept of a “maximum wage.”

The idea that there should be some kind of “cap” on what the most successful among us earn has been gaining ground in leftist circles for a while now and was even recently endorsed by Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Rep. Keith Ellison.

In Ellison’s words, during an interview for The Progressive website, “I wasn’t joking about having a maximum wage. Why shouldn’t there be a maximum wage? I remember when Ford, GM, and Chrysler came for $25 billion to rescue the American auto industry. Okay, well how much does the guy who runs Toyota make? $28 million a year.”

There are many among us who support the idea of a guaranteed annual income, but the idea that there should be an income floor for everyone doesn’t mean that there should also be an income ceiling.

Apart from the possibility that “the guy who runs Toyota” might provide jobs and products that make our lives better in a way that the member of Congress from Minnesota’s Fifth District doesn’t, it might also behoove Ellison to consider what happened to Great Britain when it embraced a top marginal income tax rate of 98 percent back in the 1960s, in essence placing the kind of cap on income they propose, albeit by different means.

The country’s economy tanked as wealth and talent (including the members of the Beatles and Rolling Stones) fled the country, to the great distress of British workers who couldn’t.

Ellison says that “if we say your incalculable greed is not acceptable, we get called communists.”

No, just economically illiterate.

• Frances McDormand’s call for “inclusion riders” in Hollywood contracts.

“Inclusion rider” is, of course, simply the latest euphemism for quotas; in Jonah Goldberg’s words, “a ‘woke’ way of demanding the ability to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, etc.”

Apart from the noxious moral and legal implications (formal quotas likely violate the ban on employment discrimination in the

1964 Civil Rights Act), the question arises as to whether such provisions would also require, as their logic suggests, reduction of the minority or female presence in Hollywood organizations in which they are actually “overrepresented,” such as the Costume Designers Guild (80 percent female).

Didn’t think so.

The hunch is that this one won’t go anywhere. Like those who prattle on about “white privilege” but never rouse themselves to give up any of their own, it’s all purely for show, the latest expression of virtue signaling in a Hollywood exquisitely oblivious to its own hypocrisy.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.