‘The nation does not live for the economy, for economic leaders, or for economic or financial theories; on the contrary, it is finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories, which all owe unqualified service in the struggle for the self-assertion of our nation.’
—Adolf Hitler, 1936
How to beat Trump at his own game?
The question has been gnawing at the guts of the Democratic party for the last two years.
Match him tweet for tweet, insult for insult? Pander? Treat politics like reality TV or professional wrasslin’?
How do you out-Trump Trump? How do you steal his thunder…and recapture those formerly Democramt voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio?
Can you keep the heart of Trumpismo…and add a brain?
Swamp seamstress
No greater flattery has been offered to Donald Trump than by Elizabeth Warren. She’s stolen the dumbest elements of the president’s policy bungles and made them her presidential campaign platform.
She’s taken not only the heart of Trump’s creed, but the steel-toed boot. And as for the brain…it is the brain of a self-aggrandising, manipulative huckster with a PhD.
Our beat is money. But money flows through the veins and arteries of politics. The more money it gets, the more aggressive and destructive it becomes.
Mr Trump is one of the most ambitious politicians in American history. He wants to control where, how, and with whom we do business…how much interest we pay on our loans…and even how much stocks are worth.
The Dow would be 10,000 points higher, says he, if the Fed had listened to him.
But along cometh the Massachusetts senator with even more buffoonery. She aims to boss us around even more. And she has a plan for everything; all of them are ghastly.
Planning…planning…planning…A $100 billion plan to fight drugs…$150 billion a year for Green Manufacturing…a $600 billion student debt jubilee…a $700 billion childcare plan…a plan for this…a plan for that…
And stitching them all together would be a collection of bureaucrat/lobbyist/insider seamstresses at a new Swamp edifice, the Department of Economic Development (DED).
The new DED…pronounced ‘dead’…would function like the GOSPLAN — the centralised agency that oversaw economic planning in the old Soviet Union — stifling any attempt at genuine enterprise.
Central planning, managed trade, manipulated currency, even the fake ‘drain the Swamp’ programme (while actually giving more power to unelected Deep Staters) — she calls her collection of misbegotten proposals an ‘agenda for economic patriotism.’
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Four-year plan
But people make win-win deals with each other…doing their best to earn a living and get ahead. That’s how an economy works.
Patriotism just disguises a power grab. Like a wash of sweetish cologne on a corpse, it hides the odour of a decaying economy…while the rot continues.
Ms Warren might save herself some trouble by just searching the archives for one of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans…Or if she wants to stick with the four-year election cycle, she might brush up on her German.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler appointed Hermann Göring to come up with a four-year economic plan. The plan had most of the elements Ms Warren claims to want — creating jobs, building infrastructure, making Germans buy products made by Germans, and even getting control of big business. She could probably save time by simply having it translated.
Of course, the German plan was a total failure…as central planning always is. As the Soviet Union demonstrated, central planning can turn out tanks and rivets, but it can’t make the products and services a consumer economy really wants.
And for an obvious reason; it produces what the central planners want, not what consumers want.
Centralised planning merely hijacks decentralised planning. Peter makes a deal with Paul. Both expect to gain. Win-win, in other words. Both will be better off.
Then, along come the central planners. ‘The deal is off,’ they say. The feds force Peter to pay Paul for nothing. Obviously, Paul is happy and promises to launch a government agency to help Peter’s business.
But Peter is fed up. He closes his business, fires his employees, and retires early. Overall, the economy is worse off.
‘Economic patriotism’ is catnip for scalawag politicians. It is poison for the rest of us.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bonner has found success and garnered camaraderie in numerous communities and industries. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America’s most respected authorities. Along with Addison Wiggin, his friend and colleague, Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. Both works have been critically acclaimed internationally. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance.