Taxing imports – customs import duties – don’t do us any favors [Mr. Trump.] Notwithstanding where ownership of the foreign production resides, import duties raise prices to consumers, and send more money to be burned in the fire of federal spending. If the product is a necessity, the burden of the cost of the import duty will fall on those in need of the product. If the product is not a necessity, it will become less price competitive and possibly disappear from the market altogether.

Mr. Trump, however, is on the right track toward repatriation of American capital by lowering business taxes. But while the negative threat to levy import duties on a firm contemplating moving operations to a more economically favorable location politically appeals to class warriors, it’s really a threat to cutting off one’s nose to spite the face.

American consumers should benefit from least cost manufacturing environments.

And poorer countries know they must bootstrap themselves into the modern world, that there is no charity to bail them out from decades of socialist economic degradation. In the modern era they watched while America manufactured its way to the good life. They want to do it too, and they should.

Lower prices do not harm anyone, including Americans, and higher prices will not bring jobs back to America.

Job makers won’t leave America if the return on investment and regulatory environment remain more favorable to manufacturing in America than somewhere else. And job-making capital will return to America for the same two reasons.

These conditions should not be temporary inducements. They should be fundamental and long term features of the American business landscape. Job-making capital will come back, and will not leave in the first place, if taxes on business and income are removed, and if regulatory red tapes – at all levels of government – are eliminated.

Let’s call a spade a spade. America became socialist in the 20th century. Capital doesn’t like socialism. We can have jobs or we can have socialism. Not both.

Overt socialists like Clinton and Sanders will lament the loss of federal spending that feeds their voting blocks, and feeds their political machines. But their voting blocks would be much better fed by good paying jobs than by government handouts, price controls, subsidies, and legal shelters.

America needs to give up the socialist nightmare. Even China knows that socialism causes poverty and economic decline, though they’re not yet willing to release the communist reins of power.

Power is heroin for socialists. Cold turkey is the way to end an addiction. You don’t gradually ween from a disease. You cure it or you die from it.

We have the medicine. We know what works. We just need to quit listening to the socialists selling snake oil.