Trump! Change! America First!

Patrick Buchanan: At Last, America First!

​More after the break!

There is little doubt that a change is coming. The doubt is over what that means. Another thing about which there is little doubt is none of us knows what this means in the least.

Maddog is but a limited pony. One of our tricks is to never be enamored by what something appears to be, and always take the time to look under the hood, kick the tires, and generally figure out the what question. 

Here, we can see the change, Trump is unlike any politician we have ever seen, or even read about. Trump sacking the conservative party is something indeed. But what this actually means, whether Trump is ushering in The Change, or whether he is simply kicking off a period of change is unclear. 

What is clear is that globalism has been very good for America, but at the same time productivity increases have deeply eroded the jobs which used to attach to manufacturing. Trump seems to agree with these workers that this problem was caused by trade, and free trade agreements. Maddog strongly disagrees with this analysis. Trump also has little or no understanding of trade generally, and trade deficits specifically. No matter, America apparently needs to suss out these issues and finally put them to rest.

If Trump becomes President, he will find he cannot "bring back" the offshored jobs. They no longer exist, or more accurately, Americans are not going to be willing to take a significant cut in standard of living to allow old manufacturing employees to return to jobs making low quality, over priced made in America products. Sorry Donald, ain't gonna happen. However, Trump could very well preside over the re-onshoring of manufacturing from countries like China to the US, but the jobs will be lost in translation. The mills here will simply be automated. 

The best example of this is the cost of an egg today. Outside of California, eggs are cheap. This is because egg farms are run, managed, maintained by about 1-2 FTE's per million chickens. This, obviously, was not always the case. In the past one small farmer may have had a few hundred chickens. This made eggs dear, after all the farmer had to eat too. Does anyone actually want to return to a time when food comprised 25% of the average budget? Today it comprises 6%, just so you have an accurate comparison. 

And where would we get the huge number of necessary fools willing to give up modernity for immediate post Roman era serfdom? after all, one farmer today tending a few hundred laying hens would have a mighty tiny budget to live on, even if we gave them the land free, and clear, and free of taxes.

Trump is embarking on a crusade either to educate the working class masses, or failure. But as a Man of Action he is appealing to this latent mass movement now. 

I have no idea where it will go, and neither does Trump.

Reading to help understand the issues of the Man of Action, and the Mass Movement:

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics) Paperback – January 19, 2010

Eric Hoffer

All of Hoffer's books are worth reading, but the True Believer is necessary to understand the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century.