EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Jeffrey Tucker*
Just days after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, the mask (such as it had been up to then) fell off. He quietly began telling reporters that he could be “tricked” into raising taxes, raising the minimum wage, and printing enough money to cover the national debt payments with cheap dollars.
“In my plan, [taxes] go down. But until we get that done, they go up,” Trump said. “I think taxes on the rich go up to a certain level.” (After the outcry, he began to claim that he meant they would go up from his proposed tax cuts.)
On the minimum wage, he is no different from Obama and also does not take into account market forces, as if workers' wages are exclusively and solely at the discretion of political leaders: "I think people should get paid more ... I don't know how you live on $7.25 an hour."
He says he will leave it up to each state to decide its own minimum wage. Which begs the question: why is he even talking about it? That measure could be taken by a state right now. The Department of Labor, which he will head as president, has significant authority to push local laws as it sees fit. If Trump approves a higher minimum wage, he will get it.
By the way, a higher minimum wage can also be a very important part of an anti-immigration policy. If low-paying jobs become illegal, immigrants have no incentive to cross the U.S. border. The eugenicists who passed the immigration laws in the 1920s are well aware of this consequence.
As for the national debt, Trump says it cannot be paid off and cannot default on its payments. That leaves only one option: printing money.
Somehow, this flood of political ideas shocked even Vox magazine, which noted“the leftist economics that Trump embraces as his own.”
Trump's succession
Opposing tax increases and holding down job-killing minimum wage levels are two areas where Republicans are playing catch-up. In any case, since I've been around, no Republican presidential candidate has said they would raise taxes, making it a departure from the norm. And certainly, none of them have toyed with the idea of inflating the debt, at least not publicly.
These policies are an aberration, judging by his party, but no one should be surprised by Trump’s desire to expand government. Come to think of it, the core of his agenda has always been to do just that. Trump wants to prevent American companies from hiring people from abroad. His desire is to take private property located on the border and nationalize it by building a wall. He praises concentration camps for Japanese, calls for the shutdown of parts of the Internet, insists on mass surveillance, and advocates for vast new intrusions on Americans’ right to buy products from abroad.
This is just the beginning. Since the start of his campaign last summer, he has been building a case for bigger and more aggressive government. Trump begins with rhetorical attacks on immigrants and international trade while extolling his managerial powers as a much-needed “ CEO of the United States.”
Typically, presidents run on a platform of reforming the government, cutting government spending, improving governance, controlling the administration, etc. Ultimately, the machinery of the state, not the entire country, is their field of action.
But not Trump. He longs to be in charge, to run America the same way he runs his business. He will put his brand on the entire nation, as he does with everything else he owns, giving it his own grandeur. Perhaps the last president who was so outspoken about his belief that he runs the entire nation was Roosevelt himself.
When Trump casually mentions the possibility of raising taxes on the “rich” (we know how that always ends up) or ballooning the debt, it should not cause fear or alarm. It is a consequence of his philosophy of governance, which is not that we live under the rule of law, but rather that we must exist under the rule of one man.
Blinded by anti-leftism
Why would anyone think Trump is anything other than a big-government builder? Much of this belief must be explained by the strange way people attribute their own ideological yearnings to certain candidates, hoping that Trump shares their values.
Trump has shaped himself as an anti-establishment candidate, a classic populist. You might think that this position has something to do with being anti-state? That would be a mistake. For him, being anti-establishment has always meant that the “wrong people” are simply in power at the moment.
He despised political correctness, made strategically calculated noises about guns and global warming, etc. He opposed leftism, which the naive observer might misinterpret as opposition to government expansion.
At least we should not kid ourselves. The twentieth century, in which fascism devastated freedom in the name of opposing the communist threat, was not so long ago. Prominent minds such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises witnessed precisely this, trying to warn the world about the dangers of far-right authoritarianism.
Both published books in 1944 (Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Mises's Omnipotent Government) that pointed out that despotism can come in many forms. It can be left-wing or right-wing. Opposing one and promoting the other is not supporting freedom.
The left and right legs of statism dance a “diabolical” ballet. One “leg” gains control and encourages resentment and retaliation. The other, accordingly, takes command and declares war on its political enemies. The population is divided. Everything becomes a struggle for power, but each side has an interest in winning more. It is better to think of the right and the left as factions of the same party. They may be right about some things, but neither side promotes freedom as the answer to social and economic problems.
There are no winners in the culture wars.
For generations, the Republican Party has tolerated a minority within its ranks that leans toward freedom. There have been many iterations of this: supply-side economists, the “leave-us-alone” coalition, the Tea Party, and so on. Their interests tend to align with the business class and the anti-establishment bourgeoisie, which is fed up with regulation, taxes, and wars.
With the traditional Republican coalition shattered, Americans are beginning to encounter a different and more consistent authoritarianism that has the flavor of the right wing there. I have argued in another article that this phenomenon can properly be called fascism. It may look like a movement organized to stop the rise of the left, but it uses the same means to achieve its goals, slightly different in nuance and appeal.
You can read a thousand definitions of what fascism is. I support Ludwig von Mises's. He says that the minimum requirements for something to be called fascism are: it must be nationalistic about trade and immigration, and it must glorify leadership as a method of controlling the nation. Fascism is a type of socialism - it necessarily interferes with the affairs of the free market. But this type of socialism has eliminated the things the left has advocated that the middle class finds so irritating. A person can retain nominal ownership of their property, even though in reality they are simply administering it for the benefit of the state. Family and religion can remain intact. What is necessary is that you direct your primary loyalty to the central government.
In the immortal words of Mussolini: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
Trump argues something similar: “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.”
Beyond the Red Scare
Every time I post about Trump, I get angry comments asking why I don’t rail against Clinton and Sanders. Any rhetoric against Trump, they say, only serves the left and its agenda. But it’s this approach (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) that has fueled some of the bloodiest wars in history.
True liberals should never be fooled by false promises. To see and understand the danger, we must look beyond the Red Scare and realize that politics is much more complicated than simply opposing the “greatest evil.” These “lesser evils” that lower our guard by exploiting our fears of “greater evils” often turn out to be the greatest threat.
* Translation: Zdravko Barov.
Editorial: Boyan Popunkov
You can see the original article HERE
"That didn't take long" from the original article is quite appropriate, it's time to take social propaganda into their own hands. They'll have to work hard on the left to get such a weak candidate for president. But they'll probably succeed. Maybe it would have been easier for them with an outspoken communist.