Trump Is Turning Around a 100-Year-Old Problem

American Thinker 

America’s ills began in the early twentieth century. Trump has his work cut out for him.

We are becoming gutless and uninspired. 

• Endless giveaways
• Subsidies to big corporations, as well as to millions of illegals
• Dilution of Medicare (as it becomes Medicare Advantage)
• Millions of extra dollars to upgrade failing education, which keeps failing more and more
• Insider trading by our legislators
• People buying online instead of shopping, thus ignoring suitability based on the five senses
• Poor eating habits based on instant foods and takeouts
• Children not active outdoors, but instead on electronic devices day and night
• Declining belief in God, with associated decline in church attendance
• Overeating from boredom, with concomitant obesity
• Manipulation of the voting habits of the population by Madison Avenue and online video clips (many of A.I. origin — i.e., not based in reality)
• Fewer people reading articles or books
• Couples shacking up instead of building a family-focused future

The list goes on and on.

How did we get to such a sickening array of missteps and confused values?  To understand this quality-of-life decline, we must turn our historical telescope back in time to the early twentieth century, and in particular to the administration of Pres. Woodrow Wilson.  During his administration, we see the passage of a federal income tax amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act (I almost typed “Antitruth Act”).

The income tax became a giant step toward socialism and a buy-in to the John Stuart Mill philosophy of utilitarianism — the greatest good for the greatest number.  The initiative of the individual consumer and the ingenuity of inventors and businessmen for wealth creation was, with the income tax, to be supplemented by government involvement in the economy.  The new flow of dollars into the government would be a new source of government (third-party) leverage in addition to the interactions of buyers, sellers, employers, and employees.

The Democrats became the party of socialism lite.  They rejected socialism, which advances the ideas and ideals of government control and dominance of industry, but retained the vision of government as an essential third party or player in a successful economy.  This replaced the ideals of initiative and hope lying with the individual businessman, inventor, consumer, and self-interested worker.  Adam Smith’s laissez-faire understanding of the economic order began to be replaced. 

At around the same time, the Clayton Act was passed.  It was to provide antitrust leverage against the so-called bogeymen of monopoly and oligopoly, which had begun to grip American life in the 1890s and were expressed in the Sherman Act, which, however, proved to be too vague for effective antitrust challenges posed to consumers.  The terminology of the Clayton Act was more lucid than Sherman and was a much better government tool for prosecutingso-called corporate malefactors.

The third prong of this new Democrat party initiative to integrate more government involvement (garbed in “regulation” as opposed to socialist “control”) was to regulate various banking practices by creating the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve was set in place purportedly to prevent or recover from bank failures, which periodically beset our banking system.  Yet within less than twenty years after the creation of the Federal Reserve, we went into the worst depression the country had ever seen.  We witnessed the collapse of banks and a temporary shutdown of banks by the Roosevelt administration to prevent even the largest banks from collapsing.

Where was the money to recover from this dismal development of the Great Depression to come from?  Our president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, under the semi-socialist spell of the economist John Maynard Keynes, took the economy off the gold standard so that more and more dollars — actual bills and coins — could be minted and printed and distributed to banks so they could make more loans.  Those loans would go to business start-ups or expanded recovery production of existing companies that had retrenched by limiting production and hirings in the early 1930s.

However, by 1938, fully nine years after the November 1929 stock market collapse, unemployment was still at 19% only a little lower than what it was in 1932.  Only our armament for WWII provided the upsurge of economic growth that renewed us after the 1929 crash.

The above three reforms of our economic system together represented a giant step away from the ideals of a state- and local-centered USA and a reliance on individual initiative and responsibility, which were hallmarks of the founding of the country.  The steps taken by Wilson, while not full blown socialism or communism, went much farther in the direction of federal participation (actually, the word “intrusion” would be better) into the economic affairs of “the people.”

These actions opened the door to power struggles over the federal government’s role in economic development and regulations, which ballooned after Wilson in the New Deal and beyond the New Deal’s many “alphabet agencies” to the plethora of federal departments that now interpenetrate the state and local practices in almost every sphere of life.  I call this massive bureaucratic entrenchment The Authoritarian Family Model.  It is not the Freedom Model of laissez-faire Adam Smith Capitalism.   

In the late 1980s, this writer had a clerical job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the clerical employees had to go to a workshop that emphasized that we, as employees, were “family.”  One of the participants raised his hand and made a compelling point.  He said, “I can be fired from the Port Authority, but I can’t be fired from my family, so — no — I can’t think of the Port Authority as my ‘family away from home.’”

Pres. Trump, an example of the hard-nosed, freewheeling (and sometimes crude and rude) businessman, is pushing back against this authoritarian model of the government.  In the midst of the chaos and decline resulting from the authoritarian model, we see markers of recovery.  The Dept. of War is promising to be more battle-ready and less DIE-ready. Under Pete Hegseth, the military’s socio-ethnic-gender goals have been abandoned.  Further, Trump instinctively knows we want a secretary of health who is healthy, not a man wearing a dress.  The dress clearly points to a mental health problem (not a mental health solution) and thus diminishes the vigor and focus of our federal government.

Instead of printing more and more money to pay the interest on skyrocketing debt and thereby creating price inflation, widespread tariffs have been negotiated and implemented by the Trump administration.  This has created an income stream for the country that became gradually diminished after the federal income tax was established during the Woodrow Wilson term of office.  The president realizes we need to restore solvency — meaning reducing our debt — by having enhanced cash flows and input with less borrowing and less printing. That means cutting federal expenses and inviting greater and greater investment.

President Trump, based on a lifetime of investments, deal-making, and business success, is trying to restore a market-based direction for the American economy.