Washington • Republicans say they favor free markets. They’re not like those pinko-commie Democrats, who prefer “picking winners and losers.”
Republicans love picking winners and losers, too. They just choose different winners and different losers than Democrats do. In the case of today’s Republican officials, the winners are mostly donors, incumbents, culture-war favorites and cheats.
On Thursday, the White House announced yet more tariffs, this time on steel and aluminum imports. Predictably, this protectionist measure pushed stock prices for beneficiaries like U.S. Steel and Century Aluminum way up. It also pushed stock prices for other industrial companies such as Caterpillar and Boeing -- which will now face higher prices for raw materials, as well as the threat of retaliatory tariffs abroad -- way down.