Trump to America: “Let Them Eat Eggs”

 

To wreck, to wreck, to wreck

Did I build this ship to wreck?

Florence & the Machine

As Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the cabal of plutocratic billionaires that the President calls his cabinet pursue their self-interested agenda, they are telling Americans that they need to prepare to sacrifice and feel economic pain for the good of society.

Why is it that the least advantaged in our society are always the ones asked to sacrifice for the greater good?

Trump's speech to Congress foretold economic pain for Americans.  Supposedly, tariffs, budget costs, layoffs and the elimination of the already decimated social welfare net will be good for America in the long run.  It will require sacrifice by farmers, laborers, people of color, and anyone who buys products or receives services from the government.

Perhaps sacrifice is occasionally necessary. Yet it never seems that the rich are the ones who are asked to sacrifice,

At one time the demand to ask the poor and the middle class to sacrifice was called trickle-down economics under the Reagan administration.  Tax cuts for the rich, coupled with a loosening of the regular regulatory system and cuts to the social welfare system would eventually trickle down and benefit all Americans.

Then the call for the poor to sacrifice for the country was called free trade under the Clinton administration.  Yet again, the argument was that by opening borders with free trade America would prosper, even though some in manufacturing and among the poor, the working class, and the people of color would have to sacrifice.

Then it was the demand under the Obama administration that people lose their homes so that we could afford to bail out the too big to fail banks.

The result of all those sacrifices were to produce an America with a gap between the rich and poor greater than we've seen in American history. It was to produce an America in where nearly one out of six children lived in poverty, where  economic mobility has nearly come to a halt, and the American dream of homeownership has become something that only a few can hope for.

Many years ago, philosopher John Rawls wrote his book A Theory of Justice. He argued that disinterested individuals constructing the rules of societal justice would agree to two principles. The first  would be like liberty consistent with the same liberty for everybody else. Two, what came to be known as the difference principle, specified that inequalities should be treated as arbitrary unless they work first to the advantage of the least advantaged person in our society.

Rawls’ book was a call for both political liberty and a challenge regarding the economy and social welfare. The challenge was to say inequalities were presumptively impermissible unless one could show that they were first advantageous to those who were poor.  Yet in the more than fifty years since his book was published, social policy has gone the other way. It has gone not to presuming inequalities are impermissible, and that the poor should not be to ask to sacrifice first, but that instead the poor should be asked to sacrifice ahead of the rich, ahead of the affluent, and that the inequalities in our society are somehow reflective of some basic principles of justice.

Trump's declaration that there will be pain for those who can least shoulder it is yet the latest manifestation of a series of social policies over the last cent half century that have wrecked the ship of American democracy. They are doing damage to the very framework of what has come to knit our society together  Somehow it is the belief that making people's lives miserable will motivate them to work harder, when in fact, making people more secure, economically, socially and politically, is what motivates people to work harder than what makes us all prosper.

In the end, Trump musk and his cabal of billionaires have adopted a modern-day Marie Antoinette view of the world. When Marie Antoinette was once told there was not enough bread to feed the French masses, she remarked:  “Let them eat cake.”  Perhaps now the adage for Trump fittingly would be:  “Let them eat eggs.”

Trump, Brexit, and the Failure of Mainstream Politics and Economics

The Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump have stunned the world.  Neither should.  They

are both the product of the failures of mainstream politics and economics, especially the overselling of both in terms of how they would benefit the world and more specifically, the middle and working class in the UK, the US, and perhaps around the world.
The roots of the Brexit and Trump begin in what some call the Neo-liberal restructuring of the world that begin in the late 70s and 80s with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan.  Faced with severe economic slowdowns in the UK and the US, the criticism was that the economically liberal policies of the welfare state had created high inflation and unemployment–stagflation.  The solution was to cut taxes, economic regulation, and weaken labor unions.  The theory–part of the supply side economics mantra–was that we needed to free up corporations to invest, to give them more flexibility to innovate, and to remove barriers to invest.
The Conservatives in the UK under Thatcher and then  Major and the US under Reagan and George H.W. Bush cut taxes, government regulations, waged war on the unions, and embraced international policies that took Neo-liberalism globally.  The result was GATT, NAFTA, the WTO, and other international free trade agreements that opened up the borders to capital and to some extent, labor mobility.  Yet Labor under Tony Blair and the Democrats under Bill Clinton similarly  embraced such policies, as did Cameron, George Bush, and even Obama.  All of them accepted as legitimate globalization as we know it, along with policies that embraced tax cuts and deregulation.
Even Obama–whom many Americans think as so liberal–really fell into this trap.  Upon taking office in 2009 he continued the economic policies of his predecessor that bailed out the banks but not the home owners after the 2008 economic crash, he endorsed TPP as a trade agreement, and otherwise  at best only made marginal changes in the Neo-liberal economic agenda.  Even the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank were no more than market-orientated approaches to addressing social-economic problems.  Yes, the Republicans in the US obstructed Obama, but he never did really oppose even in his first two years in office with large Democratic majorities the core trajectory of Neo-liberalism.
This Neo-liberalism was politically solid by politicians and the major parties in Europe and the US as economically a win-win for all.  It was described as producing the greatest economic good for all.  Mainstream economists–sitting from the luxury of their tenured chairs or luxurious offices a top Wall Street, described free trade, globalization, and economic restructuring as economically efficient–both in a Kaldor-Hicks way (the greatest good for the great number) and Pareto (producing the winners without any or significant losers).  The few jobs lost in manufacturing would more than be made of by the benefits of free trade.  Together, orthodox economics and the mainstream parties sold the world, or at least voters in the US and UK, a story of economic prosperity.
Yet it never happened.  Somewhere along the line the economic benefits did not trickle down.  Wages have stagnated over the last 40 years, the gap between the rich and poor exploded, and the loss of manufacturing and other jobs has totaled in the tens of millions. The working class has disproportionally taken the hit, with the costs of Neo-liberalism falling on them while few of the benefits reaching them.
Now combine that with another political failure–the Bush War on Terrorism, He and Blair  launched politically disruptive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have destabilized the Middle East, creating the forces that have nurtured ISIS and the crisis in Syria that has now thrown millions of refugees across Europe. In the US, NAFTA helped destabilize the Mexican economy, creating the impetus for immigrants there to flee to the US for jobs.
The result is economic insecurity for many white working class, major parties largely blind to their fate, and a ready scapegoat of immigrants to blame.  Enter Brexit and Trump.
The Brexit vote is a statement that the status quo is not working.  The vote in the UK to exit was mostly in working class England.  In the US, the core of the Trump support was originally among white working class without college educations.  The same who supported Brexit, those who have lost out in the last generation or two  who perceive it is the immigrants who are taking their jobs.    The British Independence Party, Donald Trump, and others such as LaPen in France are appealing to economic insecurities, fear of immigrants, nationalism, and simply racism and religion.  And their appeals are effective.  Brexit gives credence to claims that trump has tapped into a phenomena that might put him in the White House.  Hillary Clinton, while enjoying many political advantages, seems largely clueless to the Neo-liberal paradigm of which she is a part.
Yes, all of this is disgusting, but given the failures of mainstream politics and economics to address or recognize the world it has created, the reaction here should not be a surprise.