The Business Of America Is Business - Donald Trump And Let The Buying And Selling Begin!

'Engine' Charlie Wilson, former CEO of General Motors famously said that 'The business of America is business', and he hit the nail on the head, but his aphorism did not just apply to corporate interests, but to the very ethos of the country.  Americans all learn about the economic value of everything, are able to negotiate from a very early age - a larger portion of meat, the proper reward for polishing, dusting, re-arranging, and emptying. 

When a young boy was given bathroom cleaning as his chore and his sister vacuuming, both for the same allowance, he protested. 'Cleaning toilets is disgusting', he said.  'I should be paid more', to which his sister replied, 'Perhaps, but it takes you less time.  We're even'. 

One man takes a longer but less trafficked route, while his wife rankles at his waste of time and money.  There is only one way to go, says she, the least costly way, but her route is difficult, distracting, and banked with bad intersections. 

He buys an expensive suit while his wife hits the roof over the cost. 'I buy one new suit every fifteen years', he says.  'Amortize that'; but that is no comfort for a woman who has been brought up to believe in the absolute value of price.  There is a sticker price for everything, she believes, and lowering it is the Holy Grail. Sitting on an investment portfolio of millions means nothing if that price cannot be brought down. A touch of Calvinism kicks in every time she looks at a price tag.  'Too much!!!', her inner Puritan voice hollers. 

 

In America, we instinctively understand the economic value of everything.  Marriage is a contract, properly adjudicated, agreed upon, negotiated, and signed and both explicit and implicit codicils and caveats are part of the bargain. Limits, duties, responsibilities, and attention paid are all matters of preserving the economic value of the bargain. 

In the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, the Jude Law character, noticing that he has been paying too little attention to his girlfriend sulking in her cabin, asks Ripley to excuse him. 'Marge maintenance', he says, and goes below decks to service her. Part of a male-female dynamic played out a hundred thousand times a day. 

A consultant who was asked to help a small drilling operation, long funded by a non-profit foundation, to become private in the new, post-Communist world of Romania, found that the drilling team had no idea whatsoever about the nature of the market.  Pointing to his co-workers, the head of the drilling team asked the consultant, 'Who is the owner?', having no sense whatsoever of the investment, shares, or capital that underlie ownership. 

A taxi driver complained to the consultant that he couldn't make any money with fares so low.  The consultant suggested that he raise his rates to cover his needs, but not too high as to depress demand.  The taximan looked at him incredulously.  'How?  It can't be'.  For the man, after fifty years of Communism, not only did the private market never exist, but the whole notion of private exchange, so innate and central to the American ethos was a foreign, unbelievable idea. 

Of course buying and selling is as old as humanity.  Whether barter, cowpie shells, beads, chickens, or labor, negotiated exchange has existed forever.  Yet only in Americans, it seems, has it become so much a part of the culture - a universal, unquestioned, innate belief in the right and rightness of setting prices and negotiating for profit.   

Americans have taken capitalism to an iconic level.  Not only is the economy based on market principles, but each and every one operates by the same rules every day of the year.  Whether marital relations or buying a new car, the playbook is the same.  Men negotiate for sex, and women to avoid it.  Used car dealers chop the clock, and buyers are skeptical.  The minute we wake up in the morning, the meter is running. 

And so it is that the Trump revolution is among many other things a revolt against neo-socialist progressivism.  Giving my money (tax revenues) away to someone who has not earned their own and has no intention of so doing, goes against the grain.  Affirmative action - giving a valued university placement to an unqualified applicant and paying his tuition while refusing entry to a full-freight-paying qualified one, is a corruption of foundational values.  

Restricting private enterprise - the essential human activity since the first human settlements - in the interest of vague notions of 'equity', ignores history, human nature, and the value of opportunity. Disrupting market forces for subjective, unproven, arrogated assumptions is wrong and wrong again. 

The so-called Robber Barons - the industrialists who in a laissez-faire era of capitalism built the foundations of the American economic empire - were single-minded and absolute in their desire to build, to dominate, and control.  As a result of the intellectual energy, ambition, and pure desire of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Morgan America would rule the world and their pockets would be filled with cash.

 

It didn't take long before progressives took umbrage at this accumulation of wealth, never looking beyond money to the factories, railroads, and financial institutions created and expanded by these men.  So much money in private hands - and ill-gotten money at that, amassed on the backs of the poor - was immoral, and should not stand; and so big government was born and raised, and attempt was thereafter made to quiet the private enterprise of every individual and more importantly to quiet the very entrepreneurial, valuating nature of them. 

The Land of Giveaway reached its nadir in the recently concluded Biden-Harris Administration in Washington.  Government money was there for the asking.  Billions of dollars of tax revenues were spent on imaginary infrastructure projects, unproven social programs, and investments in wildly erratic 'environmentally healthy' programs made. Worse, individual responsibility whether financial, economic, or social, was demeaned and dismissed. Communitarianism, a transparent re-introduction of failed socialist schemes, an idolatry of race, gender, and ethnicity served up the expense of individualism became the zeitgeist. 

It is no wonder that a counter-revolution was in order.  It's tenets are simple: keep what you earn, and expect no one to pay for you; invest, profit, and benefit from your own labor; supply and demand is the law of the land; government has no business in how you run your affairs; 'can' instead of 'should' is the byword of the new generation. 

The new Trump Administration will not only dramatically reduce the size of government and reduce dependence on it; and not only will release the productive energy of the private sector, but will reset the ethical compass - individualism, unrestricted personal enterprise and interchange, and the restoration of the individual to social primacy.  This last, among all else, is the centerpiece of the Trump revolution. 

The nagging, hectoring, badgering, and intimidation by th so-called social reformers of the Left is over. Identity politics is a thing of the past - no one will be given an artificially confected suit of correctness, no one will be obliged to bow down to blackness, gayness, or any other -ness. Everyone will pull his own weight, and the human dynamics that have always ruled the configuration of society will be freed to do so once again. 

'Government is not the solution', said Ronald Reagan. 'Government is the problem', and only Donald Trump in his second term in office will finally, and once and for all, address the issue. 

Is there a role for government? Yes, but limited.  The Constitution is clear about one and only one role - national defense.  The other government agencies have been created and accrued over time with little logic and less national interest.  They are assumed to be necessary but have never been called to justify why. What are their objectives, how were they derived, have they been measured for impact and performance, and could they have been met better by the private sector?

The Trump Administration will ask these questions and demand answers. 

Divisive America, A Problem? - Hardly, Clash Not Compromise Has Been History's And Darwin's Lesson

A recent article in a national newsmagazine bemoaned the fact that the country had reverted to what the writer saw as a tribally primitive land, ruled by pettiness, outrageous shamanistic claims, and a bullying righteousness.  

Of course he took the Right to task for returning America to such a Paleolithic place - they are the ones who, ignorant, indulgent, and credulous, are responsible for democracy dying in darkness.  Locked in their squirrel-hunting, bass boat woodsheds, they see nothing but drying coonskins and rat shit, come out to vote for an idolater, a brutish clown, and go back in. 

Yes, the country is divided along party, cultural and political lines; and yes the clashes are often untamed, certainly intemperate, and as ad hominem and barbaric, but no more than the good ol' days of Early America.  In the election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson one of Adams' handbills accused Jackson of being a cannibal, that after massacring over 500 Indians one evening, “the blood thirsty Jackson began again to show his cannibal propensities, by ordering his Bowman to dress a dozen of these Indian bodies for his breakfast, which he devoured without leaving even a fragment.” 

A supporter of Adams named Charles Hammond, in an editorial in the Cincinnati Gazette, wrote (and emphasis is his), “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!”

Anyone who has paid even scant attention to modern American politics knows that nothing has changed.  Campaigns have been smarmy, nasty affairs straight out of barrooms, brothels, and poolhalls. The Left's witch hunting of Donald Trump - the lawfare, charges from buggery to treachery, attempts to derail, upset, discombobulate his campaign were right out of the American playbook. 

So, has the country sunk into infamy - a country with no respect for law, the judicial process, fair play, and respect? Of course not, since it has always been this way, the barmy nastiness sometimes couched in irony and innuendo, but only steps away from the bare-knuckle affairs far more common in political history. 

Are we more divided than ever? Perhaps yes, but so what?  History shows only that the clash of civilizations, societies, and cultures is permanent; and that one side will always prevail.  Along the way civilization - art, literature, science, and its darker corollaries - will be spread until thwarted.  Napoleon met his Waterloo.  Eventually Genghis Khan's Mongol-Turkic successors were turned back.  Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded, Robespierre ran amok and was silenced, the Russian Revolution introduced the world to Communism and after infecting much of it, was itself overthrown, discredited and dismissed. 

Pressure builds up until revolution breaks out.  The French and Russian Revolutions did not happen overnight.  It took years of oppression and frustration for the populace to finally act.  The American Revolution was no different, and only a casus belli, The Boston Tea Party, finally caused it to erupt. 

America today is no different.  After four year of the Left’s hectoring, shaming, dismissively arrogant assumptions of right, a coalition of Americans have had enough.  Tired of being called 'garbage' and 'deplorables', tossed aside like trash, given no more respect than curbside litter, they revolted.  

They were not the prognathous-jawed, thick-foreheaded Neanderthals assumed by the righteous Left.  They wanted no part or the Godless, transvestite, black idolatrous, socialist vision foisted upon them.  Nor did they want the received wisdom and arrogated authority of official Washington, Right or Left. 

It is right to be divisive, for that is how fundamental structural change happens - revolution.  It is Darwinism at its most obvious.  Political philosophy is no different than a newt's eye or a salamander's webbing.  The conflict between an originalist, nativist, fundamentalist Right and a fantastical progressivist Left is normal and expected.  The air must be cleared.  The Right will no longer knuckle under to the presumptuous and arrogant demands of the Left.  

Ronald Reagan began the movement, and Republican presidents followed suit.  The neo-socialist welfare state of FDR was questioned and challenged.  The Left was still old fashioned, labor-oriented, community organizing, and communitarian.  It gave a good fight, ruled now and again, but never had it coalesced into the bolus of viral political animus of today.  

The Right wasn't just wrong, they were dead wrong; and evil besides.  Donald Trump was not just a populist trouble maker, a bombastic showman, and a vaudevillian.  He was the spawn of the devil and should be treated as such. 

And so the divisions and divisiveness of the country increased and quite naturally so.  It was a matter of principle, long held, historic, and permanent said the Right.  It was a matter of moral vision, said the Left, a New Age vision of equality which brooked no opposition.  An existential moment. 

The resounding victory of Donald Trump in 2024 was the first explosive step toward redressing the imbalance.  It was not - as progressives rightly observed - simply an electoral victory but a cultural one.  Gone would be the old pillars of power - the bloated bureaucracy, the notional righteousness of the ruling elite, the internationalist, environmentalist, faux communitarian ethos of the Left; and in their place would be a proudly nationalistic government.  Gone would be any trace of fabulist sexuality, the idolatry of racial identity, the inclusiveness of slums and dysfunction, and the myth of wealth equality. 

The Left is flummoxed, discombobulated, and gobsmacked.  They don't know what hit them.  The juggernaut was supposed to be on their watch.  Utopia was supposed to be at hand; and now, licking their wounds, headed back to the kennel, they are dazed and confused. 

They have nothing to go on but the old, tired, vindictive howls of 'Racist! Misogynist! Homophobe!', and will need to get their heads together and come up with something, anything to rid the capital of this....this scourge!

They probably will figure something out, but not until it's too late.  At the same time, pendulums being what they are, as much as conservatives may hope for an unbridled future ad perpetuam, it won't be.  So these four years must be truly upsetting - the wrecking crew is already in place, and on Day One the demolition will begin.  There will be little left of the progressive agenda after four years if the crew does their job quickly, thoroughly, and well.  

It will be a major polar shift - away from official Washington to the states and their residents.  A radical populism the country has never seen. 

So while the Left is still wondering wha' happened? the new Administration will not stop until 'Mission Accomplished' - that ironically naive pronouncement by George Bush which will now be realized. 

Here It Comes! The Outrageous, Bulldozing, Upending Trump Cavalcade - Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again

Donald Trump's victory was a victory for conservatism - secure borders, a strong military, a muscular foreign policy, energy independence, smaller and less intrusive government, private enterprise, and individualism. 

It was also an out-and-out rejection of the fanciful, ideas of gender reallocation, racial idolatry, historical revisionism, and neo-socialist economics.  

More than all that, the victory meant a radical change in culture. As much as liberal Democrats claimed an Onward Christian Soldiers righteous militancy, they were nothing but attack dogs sic'd on the former President.  There was never any serious radicalism, visionary promise, or scintilla of reason, only a barking, rabid hysteria. 

Now that the howling and yapping are over, Donald Trump is poised to take the Presidency again, and the Left has been shown to be an empty kennel, bits and pieces of fur and dried saliva on the walls, but attack dogs fled and gone.  The Left ran on rage and rabidity, and now, licking their wounds, flailing to find some voice, some coherence, some gumption, could not.

What the Left never understood was the coming cultural change.  Conservative policies are nothing compared to the revolutionary individualism of the newcomers.  Not only did Trumpists run against the progressive cliques and claques with their strange, medieval ideas and witch trial mentality, but vowed to uproot them, slash and burn the culture of received wisdom, cant, and assumed right. 

The Right vowed to replace the race-gender-ethnicity window dressing of the Left - propped up hires who were to show the country what America looks like and needed no talent, or experience to to do so; and the results of that failed experiment showed on November 5th. 

The charade of assumption will go on the first day of the new Administration, and gone will  be the banal idealism of tedious thinkers.  'You ain't seen nothin' yet' was the Right's meme, war cry, and ethos. 

At the center of the this upheaval, this serious attempt to ransack the government buildings up and down Independence Avenue, laying waste to the insane number of cubicles, partitions, useless meeting rooms, and tube lights, is the new Department of Government Efficiency, run by two Genghis Khans whose brief is to encourage efficiency by ridding government of the thousands of unneeded departments, divisions, and sections that are clogging up the productive private pipelines of the economy.  Theirs will be a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners approach to reforming government.  

 

The White House initiates political legislation, Congress passes it into law, but then the great, voracious bureaucracies swallow it and regurgitate it into a messy bolus, a squishy amorphous thing with so many self-serving caveats and codicils, it does nothing but preserve the bureaucrats who created it. 

If the bureaucracy goes, then restrictive regulations go, self-perpetuating reasons for obstructing progress go, and the private decks are cleared for running.  There is nothing more central to the Right's vision than the lock, stock, and barrel elimination of the bureaucracy.  And who better to oversee it than Elon Musk who started with nothing, but on the basis of brains, ability, and ambition became the world's richest man, an intellectual influencer, an inventor-creator, a genius. 

The other Cabinet picks are in-your-face, get-over-it appointments. Robert Kennedy, Jr.? A wild-eyed demi-conspiracy theorist brewing old liberal ideas with Robber Baron economics and Wild West cattle drives for Secretary of Health and Human Welfare? Trump could have chosen a doctor, a health professional, a settled researcher; but he chose a wild man, an anti-vaxxer crazy for the job.  With all organs of power in Republican hands, why not? Give the losers a dose of their own medicine, let 'em see who's boss, and maybe this wingnut might find some gold in the hills.  At the very least, if there is another epidemic, it won't be like the COVID lockdown horror show. 

And appointments with pending court cases? Phooey, let the Democrats fester and fume at the indignity while Trump's Senate approves one rock-ribbed conservative appointment after another.  Cabinet appointments have never had to have had technical experience - that's what aides are for.  The Secretary of Defense does not have go know what makes a missile fire - he only authorizes it.  The Secretary of State does not have to be a Princeton scholar whose has parsed Middle East politics - he only has to authorize a continued strong support of Israel, a firm No to Iran, an enough-is-enough to Zelensky, and an accommodation with China. 

No more pussy-footing - a clear, unequivocal America-first energy, economic, and foreign policy. No more government mandates to push unwanted electric vehicles on consumers, no more 'environmentally friendly' risk-averse tip-toeing around drilling, transport, and refinery.  And last but not least, no more coddling, mothering, shielding, and protecting against perceived insult or injury.  The coddle culture along with the cancel culture will go into the trash heap. 

No President has come to office with such a revolutionary agenda.  Not only will progressives go scurrying for the exits, but the place they left behind will be unrecognizable should they ever think of returning.  No Country For Old Progressives, not for a long, long time. 

Oh yes, and the solidly white lineup on the dais? No apologies there.  'Stick To Your Own Kind' has been humanity's mantra since the Paleolithic - Trump's was not a black world, and from that white world come loyalists, men and women who will fulfill his vision and carry out his agenda. 

'Look like America'? Who says? Nothing but fanciful, low-grade presumptions. Back to American values means loyalty, commitment, passion, and eagerness.  At the same time a genius cluster, Musk and Ramaswamy, is at the very heart of conservative reform - a good balance and a perfect storm. 

Hold on to your hats - there will be a lot of demolition noise and dust in the next four years.  Not for the faint of heart; but the pusillanimous have already run for the exits.