NEC director

At best. the director of the National Economic Council is useless, and more often than not harmful. The country would be better off if Bill Clinton had never created the post and much better off had he not named Robert Rubin its first occupant.

Good riddance to Gary Cohn, the Goldman Trojan Horse dispatched by the globalists to infiltrate an administration dedicated to nationalist economics. Now Donald Trump, who with good reasons distrusts economists, wants to name another business executive, Christopher Liddell, as his replacement. Liddell has served primarily as CFO at Microsoft and GM, perhaps well, but not for very long. His government career has been distinguished by a lack of distinction. He would presumably rise to the level of useless as NEC director, which may be exactly what Trump wants.

But for the free traders at the Wall Street Journal Liddell is a bad choice because he has "bad policy instincts" -- that is, policy instincts at variance with the dogmatic editorialists at the Journal. The only thing worse, in their blinkered view, would be Peter Navarro, Trump's ascendant guru, who is virulently anti-China and anti-"free trade."

Free trade is a myth and a typical euphemism for what is really a license for corporation to exploit labor vulnerabilities worldwide. Like the perverse concept of "shareholder value," free trade pretends that the only stakeholder in a company -- and by extension, the economy -- is the corporation, and the investors who back it. These concepts ignore the fact that workers, communities and customers, too, all have a stake in a company. The result of that fatal misconception is visible across the country in boarded-up downtowns, poverty and homelessness, and a crisis in opioid addiction.

The Journal editorialists made fun of Liddell's remarks about the day of "unbridled free markets" being over, as if that was a wacky, misguided notion. But corporate license is not the highest good, and Liddell's recognition of that makes him smarter than the journalists who have been brainwashed by years of rubbing elbows with those corporates. And, unlike the unlamented Cohn, puts him on the same page as Trump.