{"id":32389,"date":"2025-02-25T05:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=32389"},"modified":"2025-02-24T22:33:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T03:33:33","slug":"we-all-better-hope-he-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/25\/we-all-better-hope-he-can\/","title":{"rendered":"We All Better Hope He Can"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

This to me seems to be a wise policy.\u00a0 Based on the fairly frequent bubbles and panics occurring in our economic environment I\u2019m fairly convinced that the people in charge don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing.\u00a0 So, I\u2019ll assume that\u2019s what the problem is.\u00a0 The people running the economy just don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing.\u00a0 And maybe, all things considered, they\u2019re doing as good a job as is possible.\u00a0 After all, human society is a dynamic system with an enormous number of factors contributing to the output of goods and services and a big random universe throwing everything from hurricanes and droughts to wars and plagues at us in an almost completely random manner.\u00a0 Alright, I\u2019ll grant that too.\u00a0 It\u2019s a maelstrom of causes and effects.\u00a0 So then, what\u2019s a leader of the United States to do?<\/p>\n

I believe there is some guidance that can be used.\u00a0 All the way back to Aristotle and all the way up to our own nation it has been observed that the most successful, stable and the most pleasant nations to live in are the ones with the largest middle class.\u00a0 Not the one with the most billionaires and certainly not the one with the most poor people, but the one with the largest number of people who work for a living and live well enough to keep their families well-fed, well-clothed and with enough money to do something for fun every now and then.\u00a0 When the majority of the country can be described in that way you are living in as close as life on Earth can come to a paradise.<\/p>\n

And up until about the 1970\u2019s that was a reasonable description of post-WWII America.\u00a0 People thought they were well off and that their children would be even more prosperous in the future.\u00a0 But since the 1970\u2019s the proportion of Americans who felt this way has been steadily shrinking until now only the elites feel this is true.\u00a0 The working class has slipped out of the middle class and the white-collar jobs that were the hallmark of the upper middle class are disappearing from the United States through automation and through off-shoring of the manufacturing industries that used to provide both blue-collar and white-collar jobs for the majority of the nation.<\/p>\n

Well, all of this is old news.\u00a0 We all know all about it.\u00a0 Now we see Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to get American (and foreign) corporations to manufacture their products here and thereby provide Americans with relatively high value employment.\u00a0 I applaud Trump for doing this.\u00a0 He needs to do as much of this as possible.\u00a0 In fact, this will need to be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

But this is just a band-aid.\u00a0 Forcing these companies to bring some part of their manufacturing capacity back here is a small part of what\u2019s needed.\u00a0 America needs a \u201cMarshall Plan\u201d to identify the industries and infrastructure that will produce a re-invigorated middle class.\u00a0 All the super-geniuses who have created artificial intelligence and advanced automated systems need to put their supposedly infallible business acumen to the problem of how to engineer an economic order where the maximum percentage of Americans are prosperous and usefully employed.\u00a0 Call it a Marshall Plan or a Manhattan Project or just a survival plan.<\/p>\n

The free-traders or the globalists or whatever you want to call the people who deindustrialized America from the 1970\u2019s on have demonstrated how to destroy the middle class.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s the federal government\u2019s job to undo that process using the levers of power they control; taxation, tariffs and the anti-trust laws.\u00a0 But as I said it\u2019s not enough to just bring back the old industries.\u00a0 Innovation will always drive prosperity.\u00a0 Silicon Valley currently represents that innovation.\u00a0 What must be done though is to force the innovators to reckon with the dislocation that their innovation can cause to the lives of regular people and come up with a way to make change work for all of us.<\/p>\n

A hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk into his administration.\u00a0 Granted, right now Musk is entirely a disruptor of the established order.\u00a0 But he is also capable of building up new constructs.\u00a0 The challenge is to see if Trump and Musk can produce a vision that includes the restoration of the American middle class.\u00a0 I hope he can.\u00a0 We all better hope he can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[2517,972,4804,16],"class_list":["post-32389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-trump","tag-elon-musk","tag-middle-class","tag-rebuild-the-middle-class","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nWe All Better Hope He Can - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/25\/we-all-better-hope-he-can\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We All Better Hope He Can - 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