How Trump dominates and corrupts the private sector
In an era of shambolic civic life, Trump exploits a feckless Congress for unfettered power.
> Trump’s ever-shifting and contradictory rationales for tariffs (curing trade deficits, strengthening national security, punishing ingratitude, etc.) reveal that protectionism is not an economic policy but a political strategy for aggrandizing personal power. His tornado of tariffs-by-whim produces an endless auction as businesses bid for beneficial whims: intensifications of, or exemptions from, tariffs.
> As the American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac says, when tariffs are multiple and malleable, private rent-seeking (bending government for preferential treatment or for injurious treatment of competitors) displaces entrepreneurial talent and shrewd management as the path to economic success. Rent-seeking has always been with us, but not on today’s scale as innumerable factions become genuflecting supplicants, groveling for presidential favors.
- This year, he promises price controls on prescription pharmaceuticals and vows to “investigate” noncompliant companies.
- Under the personalist rule by an unfettered executive, the process is the punishment:
- “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” said such an executive, the Queen of Hearts in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
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