[Hoot Gibson]

Virtually every member of the House and Senate has supported both Free trade Agreements and Foreign Interventionism. The beneficiaries of Free Trade ARE the big dollar GOP donors. They are not going to support Trump because his Trade policy opposes their interests.

The GOP has lost 5 out of the last 6 general election popular votes. They lose because they impose their values on the electorate and are completely deaf to the needs of the electorate.

So this election is really about the status quo GOP, which is basicly a servant of the 1%, and a self perceived guardian of conservatism that is molded to their self interest, and a morphed GOP that is responsive to the electorate, and independent from large donors.

For years, the rank and file GOP have railed against political candidates that are politically correct and obey the ideological litmus tests the party has imposed. N ow that we have that candidate that is sticking his middle finger at the establishment, we are complaining?

I believe that you are absolutely wrong about free trade. In the past, politicians sold trade deals as "free trade," when some of the trade deals erected trade barriers, while benefiting big political donors and large corporations. Now, people like you attack economic freedom because the free trade label has been sullied by crooked politicians in the past.

Opening markets for American manufacturers and allowing our companies to successfully compete in free markets has always been the key to American prosperity. Protectionist policies, such as the high tariffs that Trump has threatened to impose, never benefit consumers and nobody wins trade wars.

After suggesting recently that you take time to watch some Milton Friedman videos on free trade and economic freedom, I watched one of his speeches that I had not seen before. Friedman used the example of American tariffs on sugar, which resulted in the price of sugar for consumers being 500 percent as much as they would have been without the tariffs. The federal government collects the tariffs and then redistributes the proceeds to the sugar producers but the end result is the transfer of money from consumers to the sugar producers. Because sugar is used in so many products, the cost to American consumers was very steep.

Politicians like tariffs because they can impose them, stick it to American consumers, boast that they have not raised taxes, and pocket large political donations from American companies that benefit from subsidies paid indirectly by consumers. Tariffs are just taxes levied on Americans under another name. They are a shell game.

Remember Trump's support for increased ethanol subsidies for Iowa farmers? Ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline, it raises food costs because it decreases the supply of corn for other uses, it damages gasoline engines, and it consumes about as much energy to produce as the energy that it produces.

So why does Trump support increasing subsidies for the ethanol industry? The answer is that he was pandering to large agribusiness corporations and Iowa farmers. We all pay dearly for ethanol use but most people outside of corn producing states like Iowa don't take time to understand that we are paying ethanol subsidies. The government has no money. It creates no wealth. As Milton Friedman was fond of saying, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

When the government interferes with free trade, costs go up - never down. Prices may go down because politicians are very good at playing shell games, but the actual cost rises because taxpayers and consumers always foot the bill for politicians' mistakes.