A real economy is by necessity a positive sum system. This is the heart of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which you will note was not called Wealth of Billionaires. That would have been a good description of the Mercantilist system that provoked the American Revolution. You may recognize it today.
Mercantilism promotes government regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting and bolstering state power at the expense of rival national powers. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, were almost universally a feature of mercantilist policy.
The Koan of the Invisible Hand
The Art of the Screw
If I bake more bread than I need, and you churn more butter than you need, we both profit by exchanging bread for butter. If I get paid a fair wage, exchanging labor for money, and exchange some of that money for rent, food, clothing, shelter, health care…then my employer, myself, and all of those I buy from make a profit. But MAGAtroids in general and The Himself in particular are incapable of grokking this. A deal, to him, is only real if he gets to rip somebody off. Profit is irrelevant to those whose only concern is privilege, of making sure that Those People don’t get anything like their fair share.
And there you also have the entire Republican Congressional agenda, their under water polling, their stark underperformance in multitudes of court cases and elections…The Bad News Boors have a fundamental problem with tax cuts, slashing Medicaid, and tariffs, the heart of their legislative agenda, which are very specifically the plans that the public hates worst.
So, Chris Hayes asked last night, how do they sell these plans?
- Do they try to pretend that none of it is happening? Yes, but they can’t.
- Do they try to pretend that it is all good for their low-income, largely rural voters? Yes, but they can’t.
- Do they try to sneak it all through in the dead of night? Yes, but they can’t.
- Do they fuss about how many bills to put everything into? Yes. And that is something they can do, but it doesn’t do them any good. It just ends up with the Thing That Ate the GQP demanding that they put it all into One Big Beautiful Bill, and actually call it that.
- Do they try to…? Yes, whatever it is, but they can’t.
In particular, there are what you might call “moderate Rs who want to cut Medicaid by somewhat less than $880 billion, and those that you might call wackadoodlidoodles who want to cut far more.
We, of course, want a government informed by empathy and by real economics, both of which are anathema to them. That means that we have to work much harder than them in the midterms and the next Presidential cycle.
And also point and laugh to the max.
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