Much as it pains me to disagree with my friend and fellow LRC columnist Laurence M. Vance, I feel I must. He states that “Trump should withhold every penny that the United States takes from taxpayers and gives to foreigners and their governments.” https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/trump-withhold-every-penny/.

Vance is such an extremist! I, in contrast am known far and wide (at least in my own mind) as Walter Moderate Block.

So, I offer a friendly amendment to Laurence’s advice to Trump: He should cut down foreign “aid” (as Peter Bauer reminds us, this is a pejorative, and inaccurate; it implies that these expenditures actually do some good; a better verbiage is government to government transfers of funds), exactly to the one penny Mr. Vance warns against. In this way we can burnish our moderate credentials and, also, better show our contempt for these transfers. As for that one penny, I hereby volunteer to give it to Trump for this purpose, so that no taxpayer is forced to do so. (I have written elsewhere that anyone who volunteers to give money to the state is a criminal; I’m willing to take the heat on this one occasion.)

Lord Bauer characterizes foreign “aid” in terms of the three “M’s”: monuments (usually a statue of the dictator, but, more often, a steel mill that produces this product at 5 times the cost of purchasing on the world market), Mercedes, and machine guns.

Lew is such a bully. He insists that when I write tongue in cheek, that I say so. Ok, ok, I really agree with Laurence Vance.

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