Trump The Totalitarian

At Least, That's What The News Says

It’s just over a month until Trump gets inaugurated. Let the liberal handwringing begin. Our nation is screwed up. It cannot come soon enough. It’s not enough to throw the existing bums out. We have to take a chainsaw to every policy and every idea they have had for at least the last 30 years if not the last 100.

Remember the story of Leopold and Loeb? They were very wealthy, and very intelligent students who murdered a boy on the South Side of Chicago in the Roaring 20s. It horrified the United States. The trial is famous because Clarence Darrow argued that they shouldn’t get the death penalty, and he prevailed. When a healthcare CEO is gunned down on the streets of NYC, 41% of Americans cheer it. Senators like Liz Warren offer up statements that say, “Well, this happens if you make people mad.” Lizzie missed the smoke signal that told her to have common sense, compassion, and a civil society.

So far I have been told that Trump is going to silence his enemies in the media via the court system that he controls. It’s not as if George Stephanopoulos didn’t defame him during a repartee with Congressperson Nancy Mace right?

But, “conservative” (hahahahahahahahahaha) David Frum alerts me this must be true.

Is Schmuck a political category? Frum is a schmuck. So is Jonah Goldberg. If the media played it objectively, they wouldn’t be sued!

Today in the Financial Times I am told that corporate CEOs are “bending the knee” to Trump because what choice do they have? They conveniently don’t recall Obama attacking Gibson guitar and other companies who wouldn’t “bend the knee”. They also conveniently don’t recall auto companies who did bend the knee at the Biden Altar of Electronic Vehicles and lost billions of dollars. They also forget that when Biden featured EVs, he left out Tesla because Elon Musk had a beef with him.

It’s another in the very long litany of Democratic complaints where they accuse someone of doing something, and then actually do it themselves.

I am happy to be critical of Republicans when they deserve it. Of course, there are people like Nevada’s Amy Tarkanian (yes, married into that famous Tarkanian basketball family) who look for every way to be critical while still calling themselves Republican, and cheering the Democrats at the same time. Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski are like that too. They would shoot themselves in the foot if they were at a range with a handgun. On purpose.

Do I think Kennedy is the right guy to head Health and Human Services? Probably not, but Trump made a pre-election deal and Kennedy voters were part of his coalition. Kennedy makes a lot of statements that are not provable. For example, the rise of autism in the US is probably not because of what is in vaccines. I don’t know the cause, but I suspect it has to do with the aggressiveness of vaccine schedules, getting vaccines that no one needs at certain ages, and the fact women are having babies in their late 30s and 40s. But, we’d need objective scientific statistical studies to prove causation.

However, is the entire apparatus that runs the medical system inside the US government corrupt? It's pretty much corrupted but not totally. See Tony Fauci as Exhibit A. The hope is that someone like Kennedy can fix it without damaging some of the great features of the American health system.

One thing is for sure. Obamacare screwed it up. It raised costs tremendously and took choice/freedom away from citizens. It also increased the number of bureaucrats. However, if you get very sick, America is the only place you want to get medical care no matter what your income level is. The greatest nurses, doctors, and other medical personnel work at facilities in the US. North of the border in Canada, they let you die. When you need a new hip in England, you get a cane. Suck it up suckers. Medical personnel up there have no choice. It’s already been made by a bureaucrat.

An acquaintance told me they had a baby in England. It was “free”. Of course, it was. Except every single person who pays taxes in England paid for it. Socialism is great, right?

Everywhere across the world, governments are falling. France, Germany, England, and Canada all will see elections for new governments very soon. People in those countries will be given a choice between big government and smaller government. A lot of the distress hinges on immigration. The leftists do not believe in borders and have let millions of illegal immigrants enter their countries. Anecdotally, walking around Paris last month I experienced it. Paris didn’t seem like Paris. It was dirty and unkempt.

Left-wing media can try and clean up the language around illegal immigration but we see the dirty results in our day-to-day lives. When left-wing media wakes up and calls it what it is instead of using euphemisms and double-speak around the problem, they might become competitive and worth paying attention to again. Until then, there is X.

Some pols in Canada want to build a wall but I think it is to keep Canadians in rather than keep US people out. The leftists are losing their grip. The world looks at Trump’s ascendance, and also looks south of the equator to Argentina and realizes what can happen if you get government out of the way. By the way, China is failing too. President Xi is doing a purge right now.

There is a lot of hand-wringing by environmentalists over Doug Burgham becoming head of the Department of Interior. Ken Burns is probably already rolling tape to save National Parks. 30% of all US land is held by the federal government. 47% of land west of the Mississippi is held by the federal government. States own quite a bit of land inside their state borders which essentially is the same. I wouldn’t worry about the national park system. No one wants to see it eliminated. But, some parks do have extensive land holdings far far from their border that probably shouldn’t be in park hands.

Selling it to private individuals will make that land more productive. They are better stewards of the land than any government.

Let’s hope Musk and Ramaswamy take on the IRS as well embracing the Fair Tax in the process. It is the only way forward given our current convoluted tax code. Anything I have seen proposed, like no taxes on tips, is just window dressing around the edges. You must stab a wooden stake through the heart of the vampire. Fair Tax does that.

Trump has appointed a lot of people into positions of power that are billionaires. Spare me the liberal tears around all of that. For the last 100 years since Woodrow Wilson, we have relied on “credentialed experts” who were supposedly “unbiased angels” when they made decisions purely because they were inside the government. That’s not the case. They engaged in crony capitalism, picked winners and losers, and in many many cases made terrible policies that we are stuck with and hard to unwind today.

There are easy things to cut. We do not need public television, public radio and things like that. Privatizing the US Post office is a great idea, and it’s not a great one because supposedly Jeff Bezos likes it.

There are going to be some real rubber meets the road issues. Republicans are going to either put up or shut up. Everyone can name a bunch of issues, but three that pop into my mind immediately are things like farm subsidies, ethanol subsidies, and sugar trading restrictions. Will Republicans vote to end those kinds of things even though it hurts their traditional voting bloc, and remember that the people who profit off those terrible policies donate a lot of money to campaigns?

I want to see Iowa Senators vote to end ethanol subsidies. Then, I believe we are on the right track. I want to see Georgia politicians vote to end peanut subsidies. I want to see Florida politicians vote to end the restrictions on the sugar trade. I want to see NY and other politicians vote to end all the bad policies that empower big banks and big insurance to be too big to fail. I want to see both parties in the Senate work together in a bipartisan manner to end the government-run Export-Import Bank. There is so much they can do if they have the intestinal fortitude to do it. But, I am so cynical I doubt much will happen.

I’d love to see off-ramps built so we can transition from the poorly designed FDR New Deal programs to free market programs that achieve the same goals via different means. Social Security comes to mind. We can’t take it away, but we can figure out how to end it with as little impact and market disruption as possible. Any MBA that can run discounted cash flow analysis can do it. Remember, FDRs programs aren’t there for any reason other than to control people and get votes.

My hope is that the people Trump puts in charge of various agencies embrace a free market approach to solving all the problems. They seem to be on the right track but it’s in the execution. Musk is an executor. He gets stuff done. Let’s see what happens. Management experts are already out there criticizing him but Musk’s own track record flies in the face of their criticism.

We all know this. It’s not enough to fire people. Firing bureaucrats is necessary because they aren’t necessary to implement a free market policy. Figuring out how to get government out of the way and letting competitive free markets allocate resources and solve problems is the way.

The way to that nirvana is the straight consumption tax, and significantly smaller government budgets that constrain spending and reform programs started in the 1930s. Government spending causes inflation.