Adroitly, President Trump has optimized outcomes for the American Worker. His is a labor market like no other.
Long overdue in the U.S., a labor market is one in which firms compete for workers, rather than workers competing for jobs.
“For the first time since data began to be collected in 2000, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.” By the Economist’s telling (Jul 12th 2018), “Fully 5.8 million more Americans are in work than in December of 2015.”
Best of all, workers are happier than they’ve been for a long time.
Not so business. For American business, it’s never enough.
Big or small, business is focused on elephantine-like expansion.
Big and small, business is nattering about labor shortages: “Ninety percent of small businesses which are hiring or trying to hire workers report that there are few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.”
With blaring headlines, the megaphones in the financial press are amplifying a message of dissatisfaction:
“The shortage is reaching a ‘critical point’ … A lack of applicants for blue-collar jobs such as trucking and construction has received particular scrutiny, as have states like Iowa where the unemployment rate is especially low (it is just 2.7 percent in the Hawkeye state).”
August 31 saw President Trump sign an executive order meant to further boost small businesses. These will be permitted “to band together to offer 401(k)s.”
Again, nice, but not enough. It never is. A businessman present piped up about “a very tight labor market … causing us a little bit of a problem.”
Contrast this gimme-more-forever-more attitude, with the patriotic perspective of your average Trump supporter: “I’m willing to take my lumps for the good of the country,” a farmer told broadcaster Laura Ingraham. “The Scottish in me says to the death.”
Look, a labor market allows wages to rise and productivity to grow, for unprofitable firms will soon fold when they find they can’t pay enough to attract workers. Scarce resources—labor and capital—are then “put to better use.” …
It takes no time at all. You listen to Bob Woodward’s halting speech. You read his lumpen prose, and you get right away what undergirds his Trump-phobic tome, “Fear: Trump in the White House.”
Naively, the president had expected to fulfill his revolutionary campaign promises to the American voters, an assumption that threw Woodward and the D.C. elites for a loop.
If past is prologue, voters don’t—and should not—get their way. After all, the views of Trump voters on American power are polar opposites of those held by the permanent state.
What does “Boobus Americanus” know? Nothing!
Woodward and the New York Times’ anonymous anti-Trump whistleblower consider the president to be stark raving bonkers for not grasping that Rome on the Potomac moves to its own beat. It does not respond to voters, except to mollify them with “bread and circuses.”
Mostly reflexively, not always consciously, The Powers That Be seek to retain and enlarge their sphere of influence. Nothing, not even the venerated vote, is allowed to alter that “balance.”
This means that established fiefdoms and the “thinking” underlying them are to remain unchanged and unchallenged. Foreign affairs, war-making, the post-war economic order and globally guided crony capitalism are examples.
Against this command-and-control apparatus, 60 million Americans rebelled. They liked Trump’s America First ideas enough to elect their champion as president.
The president promised to upend “the post-1945 rules-based international order,” and Deplorables applauded him for it.
Had Woodward and his publisher missed the 2016 Trump Revolution?
Apparently so.
Incredulous, Woodward grumbled at one Fox News host (she shares his “concerns”): “People need to wake up to what’s happening under Trump.”
Again, Woodward is hardly original in his endeavor. In the tradition of the Never Trump Resistance, within and without the administration, he and those for whom he speaks have resolved to thwart and discredit the political plank on which Trump ran.
The washed-out journalist then blurted out this in disbelief: “Trump said the ‘World Trade Organization is the worst organization in the world.’”
Hyperbole? Maybe. The FBI under James Comey, Andrew McCabe and now Christopher Wray are easily worse than the WTO.
Like the New York Times’ anonymous, op-ed writer, purportedly a member of the Trump administration, Woodward is exposing the Trump White House for nothing more than its attempts to fulfill voter demands.
Withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement was one such goal.
These senile subversives would like you to believe the president is insane for expecting to move on promises made to American voters. If not to withdraw from international agreements that have compromised ordinary Americans, at least to rework them so they don’t further pauperize our workers. …
I hope that Ilana Mercer’s columns will appear regularly here on AG. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this South-African-born writer is among today’s top-10 political intellectuals–for instance, she is rightfully credited with the concept later reworded by Steve Sailer as “invade the world, invite the world.” Whatever subject she touches–from politics to history to art and music–turns to pure gold. She is all that NRO’s Jay Nordlinger ever hopes to be. Well done, AG–great catch.
UPDATE II (10/10/018):
Is Trump Or Isn’t He?
Court historian #DorisKearnsGoodwin and CNN's #FredrickaWhitfield admit #Trump has been "keeping his promises." But for the last 2 yrs. same sorts have said he has deceived #Depolarabes. Which is it? Looks like diabolic, ? failing #Dems are trying a new strategy …
Never Trumpers, as President Donald Trump’s Republican critics are known, … Led by conservative pundits such as Max Boot, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, David Frum and George Will, they are few in number, gallantly in favour of things like free trade and fiscal discipline that Republicans used to care about, and probably doomed. Mr Trump’s hold over Republicans seems unbreakable. Almost 90% approve of his performance. “There is no Republican Party, there’s a Trump party,” says John Boehner, a former Republican congressional leader.
That conclusion, sharpened by the failure of elected Republicans to resist the president’s pandering to Vladimir Putin, has forced Never Trumpers to a moment of reckoning. Messrs Frum, Boot and Will urge conservatives to vote Democratic in the mid-terms. Mr Brooks and two Republican movers-and-shakers, Reed Galen and Juleanna Glover, are floating the idea of a new centrist party. A group part-founded by Mr Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard, hopes to launch a primary challenge to Mr Trump. Among the more or less openly disaffected Republicans Mr Kristol is courting to lead the assault are Governor John Kasich of Ohio, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley, Mr Trump’s ambassador to the UN. If none will oblige, Mr Kristol suggests he might have a crack at it himself.
Not only have DC "progressive" elites been forming policy groups and having lunches and dinners with Bill Kristol to plan joint Dem/neocon activism – you know who you are: step forward – but liberals have spent 1 1/2 years rehabilitating @BillKristol's platform: reaping the crops
“The problem is not that some unnamed White House official is disloyal to the president. The problem with the anon and gutless op-ed in the New York Times is that so many in our political class are disloyalty to … voters.”
UPDATE (9/11):
“Crazy” to Never Trumpers means keeping campaign promises:
Trump’s preference to pull out of Afghanistan is depicted in the Woodward book as yet another crazy impulse that the “adults in the room” successfully rein in. Somehow waging war for 17 years with no demonstrable gains is automatically the sane, sober, serious position.
