The So-Called “Experts” Have Been “Right” About “Several Crucial Things” Recently
I'm sure they'll get the credit they deserve!
The brain-dead right and the brain-damaged left both love railing against experts. Negging expertise is a staple of the Trump administration, and leftists treat the entire field of mainstream economics as a vast, centuries-long capitalist plot. Experts, of course, are wrong about some things sometimes, which has led some people to conclude that the smart thing to do is to listen to whichever deluded rage goblin their social media algorithm shits into their feed.
But — quietly — the experts are on a bit of a winning streak. Several recent major things have gone pretty much exactly how experts said they would. And I can’t wait for them to get credit for being right…how could they not get that credit? Experts said “If you do A, then B will happen,” and then thing A happened, followed by B, which strongly suggests that they knew what they were talking about. Probably any minute now, “mea culpas” will start rolling in from the drunk shut-ins, shameless clout chasers, and Russian chaos bots who questioned the experts in the first place.
The first area where the experts deserve some credit is tariffs. Most economists responded to Trump’s tariffs with repulsion-bordering-on-nausea, which seems justified in hindsight: Manufacturing is down and prices are up, with the strongest effects happening in sectors most affected by tariffs. The only good news about Trump’s tariffs is that they’re: 1) Illegal, and 2) A facilitator of graft as much as an economic policy; if not for those factors, things would be worse.1 For a while, we were told that Trump’s tariff strategy was 4D chess, but if this is chess, then Trump's queen has been captured, his knight is stuck up his ass, and the board has caught on fire and is igniting several Picassos that happened to be sitting nearby.