Understand something, though: many of those people making those decisions thought that the current administration would be a way to fix regulation.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.
> engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI
If they're centralizing economic planning on that, then there's probably at least some economic planning that they would be doing to keep a relatively stable regulatory regime in place.
Which, y'know, isn't the case.
Ultimately the world has reached a point where social systems in both business and government are run the same way. Probably because they're run by the same kind of person. Sometimes even the same people.
There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
- A non-independent monetary authority
- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment
- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling
back unprofitable regulations
- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
> There were purges aplenty during the Communist times, to make way for loyalist bureaucrats. What's taking place is the incipience of not just a stable regime but a calcified one.
If it were calcified, you'd probably have a lot more willingness to bet on a business decision being profitable. There'd be a very obvious, solid understanding of market rules and there would be little likelihood of them changing.
The problem with Trump - well, in this regard; there are plenty of others - is that he is used to operating as an absolute monarch, with his previous "kingdom" being the Trump Organization. That kingdom existed purely for his benefit and there wasn't really any consideration of peers like you'd have with actual kings who rule over countries with societies and borders. The only decisions he had to make right were the ones benefitting him, and whether or not they did that was quite evident.
Now he's a leader of a country that does have borders and a society. There are parties with interests that he must satisfy. You can tell he's never had to do that before and part of how he handles that is to just bully those parties into submission, but the other way is to use his status to make proclamations that supposedly have some sort of force to them to placate the other interests.
An example would be the proclamation that institutional investors will be banned from buying single-family homes. That's meant to placate his working-class base, most of whom can't afford a home. Do we know how far he'll go in enforcing that proclamation? No. It directly contradicts some of the other positions he's been identified as supporting, and is unlikely to be enforceable on a mass scale, but if he does sign some sort of order telling the DoJ or SEC or whoever to investigate purchases of that sort of real estate by institutional investors, well, you could end up at the wrong end of a government investigation, particularly if you have somehow pissed him off. Which isn't particularly hard to do, either.
Thus, you can say the regulatory regime over single-family residential real estate market is now less stable than it was before. We don't know what will happen. And that makes it hard to make a business decision around it.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
This is hubris manifest.