“Make America Competitive Again” outlined the problems confronting Donald Trump’s administration as he tries to make the American economy competitive, with more and better paying jobs. This article recommends ways to achieve those goals.
If you want to make America competitive again in today’s global economy, start with education. It stinks. There is no assurance that a high school graduate can construct a sentence, much less a paragraph, read anything more challenging than a text message, or perform simple algebra. Robotics, computers, and automation are wiping out jobs and creating new ones. It remains to be seen whether the former will outweigh the latter. Historically, innovation has been decried but predictions of net job losses have not been borne out. Bet the ranch, however, that the desirable jobs of the future will require workers who can construct paragraphs, read complex material, and possess mathematical proficiency beyond simple algebra.
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Compulsory education is an oxymoronic euphemism for indoctrination. Not only are students not being educated, they’re being brainwashed. After over a century of government-provided (and mandated) education, a substantial portion of the public believes that sustenance flows from the government—which owes it to them—rather than their own efforts. When the government becomes responsible for everything, nobody is responsible for anything. As statist dogma replaces true education—curiosity, questioning, research, experimentation, learning, thinking for one’s self—intellectual ossification sets in. The brainwashed cannot handle challenges to that dogma, want to forbid them, and retreat with fellow zombies to their execrable safe spaces.
People see the results of markets, incentives, choice, competition, and exchange every time they go to a grocery store. It’s quite a contrast to the government. To convince the populace that the forces which produce supermarket abundance have no applicability to the provision of education has indeed required long-term brainwashing. Minds are infinitely more important than mayonnaise and detergent, far too important to leave to the government.
For the US to have any chance of reaching its full potential, education must be 100 percent privatized. Parents and students have to be able to freely choose from a myriad of educational providers and philosophies. The education market must be free to organically adapt to new knowledge and society’s constantly changing requirements. Only a free market will be able to adjust to the continuing education needs of the workforce as new technologies replace old ones. There were no government retraining programs when America made the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Companies trained workers in the skills they needed and both sides had obvious incentives to make that arrangement work. Command and control in the current government-dominated system guarantees perpetual stagnation and regress.
The government is turning health into a disaster similar to education. The current public-private bastardization gives the US the worst features of both: overarching governmental command and control, destruction of competition and the enshrinement of cartels in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and insurance, and restriction of supply through professional licensing and government determinations on the “need” for hospitals and other facilities. Consequently the US spends a higher percentage of its GDP on medical care than most of the nations with which it competes, for more expensive service that is of no better quality and is often worse.
Many pine for nationalized health care, although such systems bear a large share of the responsibility for bankrupting Europe’s high-tax, no-growth welfare states. Donald Trump is on to something, advocating the abolition of Obamacare and allowing insurance to be sold across state lines. He at least recognizes that government is the problem. However, tinkering at the margins of the current system is like pulling 20 percent of the weeds from a garden. There may some superficial improvement, but the remaining weeds quickly overrun the garden. Health, like education, must be the beneficiary of free markets, competition, and choice, or the US will continue to waste trillions on medical care.
Speaking of wasting trillions, look at the loss represented by much of the US’s military and intelligence spending. Here too Trump is on to something when he talks of withdrawing from nation building and making our allies pay more of the bill for defending themselves. Here too, however, tinkering at the margins amounts to pulling 20 percent of the weeds. Hacking spending down to size requires a wholesale reevaluation of policy, which would begin by putting the defense back into defense policy. Global intervention since World War II has been an unmitigated disaster. The US is the most defensible country on the planet: it has the Atlantic and Pacific moats; varied, hard-to-conquer terrain; a well-armed population; friendly bordering countries; and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal to annihilate anyone who invades or launches a nuclear attack. Spending could be cut by at least half if the sole charge of the military and intelligence agencies was to defend the US proper, and not dubious “interests” in far-flung corners of the world.
Trump, as a businessman, is well aware of onerous taxes, wasteful spending, mounting debt, and the deadweight losses imposed by regulation. With the arguable exception of debt, he has vowed to address them. Absent an actual revolution, eliminating them would be like trying to eradicate kudzu. If he manages to whack 20 percent he’ll have done well. Spending, taxes, and regulations are Washington’s stock in trade. The bureaucrats Trump instructs to economize and to review existing laws and regulations will nod, say “Yes, sir!” and then go back to business as usual. It’s why Trump must be Feared, Not Loved.
Washington’s stock in trade has powerful beneficiaries, too. They will counterattack with all their lobbying and public relations might. If Trump is to have any long-term impact, he’s going to have to link his attacks with the idea that Washington doesn’t owe anybody anything. This, of course, runs counter to decades of indoctrination and practice. The idea that individuals are “entitled” only to what they’ve earned, put into practice, would completely upend the existing order. Trump can make the case now, or ballooning debt, unfunded entitlements, an aging population, rising interest rates, and the credit markets will make it for him. That is the fate meted out by compound interest and a long spell of debt growth in excess of economic growth.
The chances of all or even some of the above happening are slim. However, the issue is American competitiveness, and we’ve gone downhill so long, that’s what it’s going to take. America elected a man who has successfully competed all his life and among his many victories just won the biggest political prize. None of the apparatchiks, cronies, and time-servers he defeated has the brains, guts, or fortitude to tackle these monumental challenges, but Trump, who knows? He certainly has the moxie. The legions who have underestimated him so far have only the egg on their faces to show for it.
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Reblogged this on Starvin Larry.
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The incoming administration does not need to craft a “solution”, except to debride the overwhelming majority of the “solutions” we’re currently burdened with. Please, spare us any more goobermint “solutions” – just leave us alone for a change. Likewise with health care, it wasn’t until the advent of Medicare and Medicaid that we had a health care crisis in this country. The average worker of the day did not have health insurance – there wasn’t the need. Health care costs were not so outrageous, doctors were not so outrageously overpaid, and care was available and affordable to the average wage earner. When your kid broke his arm, you weren’t looking at $20, 30, or 50 grand in current dollars to set it. Likewise, people didn’t go tootling off to see a health “practitioner” for the most trifling of imagined complaints, like they do now. Insurance has become the nightmare of health care and is a self-perpetuating industry. Eliminating the industry would do much to impose a sharply downward shift in pricing and, I would argue, a marked improvement in quality.
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Most excellent. Fundamental problems do indeed require radical solutions. The only critique I would make is that you aren’t radical enough. Granting for sake of discussion that the idea of ‘limited’ government is ultimately viable, there are conceptual limits that are rarely considered and absolutely necessary, among which concern education and medicine. Presently, there are government ‘establishments’ for each. This must be proscribed in the same manner as for religion: “Government shall make no law respecting an establishment of education / medicine, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.
On defense, I have nothing to add except a possibly useful soundbite: America could be, and should be like Switzerland – armed to the teeth, and scrupulously neutral.
WRT the whole issue of automation displacing labor and “more and better paying jobs” I maintain that a basic reconceptualization is needed. Very briefly; government, in order to facilitate its economic parasitism, has engendered far too much bias towards the only useful employment and way of earning a living being a ‘job’. Further, that parasitism is making providing a ‘job’ so costly that automation is being adopted at a rate which is socially disruptive. At the same time, government has been making it more and more difficult both to be ‘self-employed’ and to subsist outside of the (government fiat) money economy. I hesitate to add to your no doubt burgeoning ‘to read’ list, but The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto [link removed, original URL (after omitting all the underscores) was h_ttp_s:/_/homebrewindustrialrevolution.word_press.c_o_m/ ] contains an extensive discussion of these (and many other) issues. It’s a large book, however, the chapters 2G:Mandatory High Overhead and 6A:Local Economies as Bases of Independence and Buffers Against Economic Turbulence are fairly short expositions of the foregoing ideas. Overall, it has a left-libertarian POV, with which I have serious differences, but there are also things which it gets very much right. The book contains a great deal of the insight and few of the fallacies of that perspective.
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I’ll add Homebrew to my burgeoning list.
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