The World According To Press-i-dent Trump…

A lot of people have suggested that Trump wants to take the world back to the 1950s. They couldn’t be more wrong!

Now, I’m not going to mock President Trump for being amazed that his son, Barron, could manage to turn on a laptop after el Presidente had turned it off. Of course someone of Trump’s age has a limited knowledge of such things. In fact, I’m very impressed that Mr Trump was capable of actually switching off the laptop in the first place. Turning a laptop off and on again can fix most things…

He and President Musk are trying much the same with the United States. They’re turning it off and finding out which bits aren’t working and which bits cause a lot of problems when you cancel them. Naturally that might mean that some things can’t be switched back on because well, if you turn off the life support then the organism that needed it may be dead… Just like the USA might have a lot of dead agreements, contracts, treaties and markets when it turns itself back on.

But the whole situation is far too complicated for a short discussion… I guess this is why the news on most channels goes for exactly thirty or sixty minutes AND it includes sport, weather and things that are completely random and have no long term significance…

Anyway, onto Mr Trump’s world view:

If you look up “mercantilism” on the internet you’ll find some interesting things but for the purposes of this I’m just going to use Wikipedia:

Mercantilism is a nationalisteconomic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports of an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resourceswithin the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.

The concept aims to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus, and it includes measures aimed at accumulating monetary reserves by a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies may have contributed to war and motivated colonial expansion.^[1] Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

Mercantilism promotes government regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting and bolstering state power at the expense of rival national powers. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, were almost universally a feature of mercantilist policy.^[2] Before it fell into decline, mercantilism was dominant in modernized parts of Europe and some areas in Africa from the 16th to the 19th centuries, a period of proto-industrialization.

This remind you of anyone you know?

I should take this opportunity to point out out that it fell into decline after people adopted the ideas of Adam Smith and his cheerleading for free markets… which may cause some of the socialists reading this to wonder if they should start embracing Trump because he seems to be so anti-Friedman and his acolytes… But that would be further evidence that my enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend, in spite of how politics seems to work from time to time…

Whatever, the mercantilists basically believed that true wealth was having as many shiny bits of precise metals that one could acquire, which is consistent with Trump’s desire to do deals to have all the rare earth stuff in Ukraine, Greenland, Canada and why he has a golden toilet and a golden shower every chance he gets…

So, Trump doesn’t want to take things back to the middle of last century; he wants to take us back to the ideas of the 17th Century before we got all these free market ideas… and back before the United States adopted that leftist Constitution thing and before they made all those woke statements in “The Declaration of Independence … (All right, they left the “white” word out of “All men are created equal…” and they just presumed that nobody would try to presume that by men, they also meant women because there are only two sexes and one of them wasn’t mentioned in the Declaration…)

As well as all this, Mr Trump seems to believe that anyone who sells you anything is ripping you off. This not only explains why he often doesn’t pay his bills, but also why you’d be a fool to buy anything from him!!

 

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