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.