If you ask what worries me about the incoming Trump Administration, I’ll immediately point to a bunch of policy issues.
- Will Trump be too timid to deal with the huge entitlement problem?
- Will Trump do a business-as-usual pork-filled infrastructure deal?
- Will Trump’s tax cut be feasible without concomitant spending discipline?
Others, though, are more focused on whether Trump’s business empire will distort decisions in the White House.
Here’s what Paul Krugman recently wrote about Trump and potential corruption.
…he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire. Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. …The question you need to ask is why this matters. …America is a very rich country, whose government spends more than $4 trillion a year, so even large-scale looting amounts to rounding error. What’s important is not the money that sticks to the fingers of the inner circle, but what they do to get that money, and the bad policy that results. …what’s truly scary is the potential impact of corruption on foreign policy. …someplace like Vladimir Putin’s Russia can easily funnel vast sums to the man at the top… So how bad will the effects of Trump-era corruption be? The best guess is, worse than you can possibly imagine.
I’m tempted to ask why Krugman wasn’t similarly worried about corruption over the past eight years. Was he fretting about Solyndra-type scams? About the pay-to-play antics at the Clinton Foundation? About Operation Choke Point and arbitrary denial of financial services to law-abiding citizens?
He seems to think that the problem of malfeasance only exists when his team isn’t in power. But that’s totally backwards. As I wrote back in 2010, people should be especially concerned and vigilant when their party holds power. It’s not just common sense. It should be a moral obligation.
But even if Krugman is a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. At least not in this case. He is absolutely on the mark when he frets about the “incentives” for massive looting by Trump and his allies.
But what frustrates me is that he doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the incentive to loot mostly exists because there’s an ability to loot. And the ability to loot mostly exists because the federal government is so big and has so much power.
And as Lord Acton famously warned, power is very tempting and very corrupting.
Which is why I’m hoping that Krugman will read John Stossel’s new column for Reason. In the piece, John correctly points out that the only way to “drain the swamp” is to shrink the size and scope of government.
…today’s complex government allows the politically connected to corrupt… most everything. …In the swamp, no one but taxpayers pays for their mistakes. …it’s well worth it for companies to invest in lobbyists and fixers who dive into the swamp to extract subsidies.For taxpayers? Not so much. While the benefits to lobbyists are concentrated, taxpayer costs are diffuse. …Draining the swamp would mean not just taking freebies away from corporations—or needy citizens—but eliminating complex handouts like Obamacare. Candidate Trump said he would repeal Obamacare. Will he? He’s already backed off of that promise, saying he likes two parts of the law—the most expensive parts.
As you can see, Stossel understands “public choice” and recognizes that making government smaller is the only sure-fire way of reducing public corruption.
Which is music to my ears, for obvious reasons.
By the way, the same problem exists in many other countries and this connects to the controversies about Trump and his business dealings. Many of the stories about potential misbehavior during a Trump Administration focus on whether the President will adjust American policy in exchange for permits and other favors from foreign governments.
But that temptation wouldn’t exist if entrepreneurs didn’t need to get permission from bureaucrats before building things such as hotels and golf courses. In other words, if more nations copied Singapore and New Zealand, there wouldn’t be much reason to worry whether the new president was willing to swap policy for permits.
International Liberty 
“Paul Krugman Goes Full Nazi in Canceling Prominent Economics Prof”
BY RICK MORAN JUN 10, 2020
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/06/10/paul-krugman-goes-full-nazi-in-canceling-prominent-economics-prof-n514246
[…] Not very poetic, but definitely accurate. […]
[…] Give us control of both Congress and the White House, they said before the election, and we’ll move our agenda to limit government and drain the swamp in Washington. […]
this elections cycle the democrats had an obscene amount of money… well known candidates… unprecedented give away programs… the support of academic institutions and the full and unconditional backing of the main stream media … they were strict adherents to multiculturalism… and politically correct thought… they maximized racial and ethnic divisions for political gain… and still…….. they lost… LOST BIG TIME… not only the presidency… but other offices at the federal and state level… voters are looking at Chicago… and seeing a future Detroit… democrat socialism and cultural Marxism are flawed ideologies… and Americans have began to evaluate them based on the results they produce… a lot of voters have decided they would be better off with a 40k pr yr job… than they would be on food stamps and living in public housing… what trump does in the next year will tell the tale of the nations future for years to come…… pray for the old fart………..
Too late. Washington, D.C. has co-opted nearly every American with “free” stuff, and nearly every American _believes_ there’s “free” stuff to be had. Ask any 20-something. The number of people paying no federal taxes/receiving money _from_ the Treasury exceeds the number of people voting. Does anyone believe this cohort will _ever_ vote to tax themselves more? Need more convincing? Look at the U-6 unemployment rate. There are simply too many politicians’ whose fat-cat job requires them to keep the gravy train running smoothly and on time.
trump is a negotiator… a statist… an egomaniacal old school democrat… a showman with an insatiable need for approval… many of his spoken positions… are in fact starting points for negotiation… I suspect like many other American’s he’s fed up with the socialist agenda of the current democrat party…. it’s time to retire our first affirmative-action president… revive our meritocracy… and re-configure the federal government to act outside of the coercive collectivist model… drain the swamp… middle class Americans are fed up with political correctness and an administration that is more concerned with transgender bathrooms than with national security and the demise of the middle class… it’s time to get back to day-to-day realities… fire the ideologues and the cultural Marxists… and deal with the sad realities of our day…
Even under an optimistic scenario, will Trump be able to undo all the coercive collectivism that has crept into America during the Bush and Obama years, — basically since the September 11 attacks propelled coercive collectivism into majoritarian status?
If not, then it is very unlikely that we will restore a robust growth trend line above with percent, at least match average world growth trend lines, and thus stop the ongoing American decline on the world stage. In other words it is unlikely that we will make America great again.
Unless America matches and exceeds average world growth, it will decline, and we will never be great again. This basic arithmetic needs to be understood before anything meaningful happens.
The biggest risk is that the American electorate would fall into the same trap as the European electorate. In other words they would say “we tried more pro growth reforms and they didn’t work. Our growth is still below par, below the world average. Might as well go back to more spending and thus also more taxation”.
The problem will be: Too little too late to arrest the decline.
So to tie to a previous post is it impossible to escape Wagner’s law?
It is not impossible just very unlikely. It is like an alien spaceship making an emergency crash landing towards earth and happening to land in Switzerland.
Make no mistake, some nations will maintain smaller government even after they become prosperous. But as I said this is very unlikely. So to hope that it will be YOUR country that does so is naïvely optimistic.
I guess that is still depressing, though not quite as depressing. Just keep mobile and be ready to emigrate. As I have said many times, everything human is moving faster in this 21st century, and will keep accelerating. National ascents and declines that used to take centuries will now complete in the mere few decades. Keep mobile.
The causality of big government is simple: “Nice prosperity we have built. Now let’s re-distribute it. The bill — the slow growth bill — will fall on future generations “.
Except that this irresponsible calculation is no longer valid.
As I said, everything human is moving fast and accelerating. The bill will come due in the voters’ lifetime. Gone are the days when the effects of redistribution could be passed on to future generations. Those times are irreversibly gone, as Greece has found out, and as most European countries are in line to find out.
So, in summary, yes it’s true, Wagner’s law is true. Average countries follow Wagner’s law. The countries that achieve and maintain exceptional prosperity are exactly the ones who avoid Wagner’s law. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
My worries about Trump are due to the past administration. I fear that the left artificially empowered the presidency because it was their president, and they liked what he was doing. Therefore, acting as a dictator was in their best interest. Unfortunately, the precedence hands down to the next guy. Will Trump be able to return to a constitutionally anchored government, or will he use the new powers invested in his position? Can he return to a proper system of checks and balances? Time will tell, but it does worry me that we have created a monster for ALL future presidents that will be hard to undo. Where is George Washington when you need him? I now one thing for certain, the democrats are longing for the filibuster rules they blew away right now. If the republicans are smart, they will use them to get past Trump’s initial picks, and then return them in a way that makes them impervious.