The odds of becoming a billionaire are extraordinarily low. To succeed you have to come up with some unique and in its own way brilliant creative idea which hardly anyone else has ever thought of before. Usually to do so this is a one time deal. You invent the Bloomberg box or the personal computer or a new way of understanding investing or a new invention or a new form of entertainment, etc. This insight whatever it is then gets broadly applied in a hundred applications. Perhaps you then become talented at all kinds of additional necessary activity required to put this insight into actual application. If, for example, you’re Bloomberg you start a whole news agency to support your product. In Trump’s case his initial genius was to combine a P.T.Barnum off the charts skill at media spectacle with a vision of what NYC could potentially be despite the city at that time suffering from some of it’s roughest years. You play a key part in turning NYC around and build landmark buildings such as Trump Tower that symbolize this turn around. You then consolidate a brand completely around your own name. Forbes famous list of the wealthiest people and Trump always disagreed about his actual net worth in that Trump valued his own name as worth more as a brand than they did. In the long run he will probably be right and they will be wrong. They are certainly wrong at least at the present moment.
Now the unique idea that makes you potentially a billionaire is not the same kind of knowledge as say a philosopher or scientist would have, it is not per se broad based in the fullest sense of the word but instrumental. Such figures may or may not have a wider level of knowledge, but what is needed is literally a key to success that opens up a door you can run through. The unique genius of Trump is that he has discovered such a key not once but potentially twice! The first time was in terms of individual economic success, the second time is in terms of politics and national economic success. And what is this key second form of genius on his part? Simply this, the overlooked by everyone else, thing called tariffs.
While it remains too soon to know for sure if this will ultimately work it is, and this site is politically neutral so I just speak of it from the standpoint of its potential success not advocacy, discovering the key weakness of globalism. Like Feurbach’s reversal of Hegel that ultimately opened up an entirely new perspective Trump’s insight flips globalism on it’s head. For at least 30 years globalism and free trade have enmeshed every politician within its tentacles and limited their room to change their countries politically. It has been the paint already on the canvas limiting what any politician could change and do. The basis of this system was free trade across the entire breadth of the world. Every country, including even communist countries, were pulled into this free trade world and every country’s future became dependent on access to the free trade system. The key to free trade was ultimately the huge prize of trade with the US, such trade was always essential, but there were also a hundred other inter-country connections as global interdependency grew. In this system as the old globalist advocates never stopped reminding Americans everything depended on no tariffs which were the absolute opposite of free trade. Never mind that lots of countries had extensive tariff systems for all extents and purposes, the US could not .
Who did this system ultimately favor? It did in some ways empower the US as the whole world became dependent on access to the US market, but probably overall it favored the most the EU and China. In some ways it actually played out as an extension of the EU model that orchestrated a key part of the model’s development where now across the whole world every country had to adhere to accepting its constrained part in the system. And of course the EU could sell its products into an entirely open US market. This even though while you saw countless German made cars in the US almost no US cars were in Germany. It also favored China which could become the outsourcing champion of the world.Ultimately while this model was championed initially by the US it severely constrained over time US power. The US was no longer exceptional, but just another global country in the free trade world system. And over time if you followed the rules of globalist free trade fully the income levels of American workers needed to be reduced and to equalize with those of workers everywhere else around the world and China would ultimately in this view eventually surpass the US as global champion as its market expanded.
Marco Rubio in his recent Senate confirmation hearings said that “the post-war global order is not just obsolete—it is now a weapon being used against us.” There is no question that in many ways what Rubio was saying here is correct. Globalism had become a key means of limiting and restraining US power in many ways and indeed had been at least in part turned against the US.
Now here’s the genius of Trump. He realized with his billionaire’s like search for the key market advantage that globalism could be turned upside down. If the entire world was enmeshed in global trade then the entire world needed trade with the US as the wealthiest country and market. In 50 years if the US kept declining and China kept expanding maybe not, but in real time right now no country could possibly afford to lose trade with the US. A system that the EU and others had perhaps believed had caught the US and limited its power actually had made everyone in the world hopelessly dependent on US markets. The US unlike virtually every other country at this point of highly developed globalism was one of only a handful of countries that could do without the trade of almost any of its partners. Could China last a month without trade with the US or Germany or countless other countries? Sure a few countries like Italy could be self sufficient but not many. If the US closed its doors to a trading partner it might cost the country something and be difficult but it could do it. Could the other country do that? Probably not and it would be a much bigger deal and even possibly ruin that countries economy to a degree that any politician responsible for such an outcome would risk losing their power.
Hence, the genius of Trump. He discovered the key weakness of globalism—it made the whole world dependent on the US for its economic success and any country denied access to US markets in deep trouble.. It’s almost like the US had planned it that way, but let us say instead that American leaders up until Trump did not want to “metaphorically” speaking like a billionaire push a competitive advantage fully. They would not ever turn the key and open that door as Trump with a very different risk taker mentality was completely comfortable doing. The whole world knows Trump will turn the key and he’s making sure everyone knows it. It’s not pretend.
Globalism it turns out has a huge strategic weakness that Trump realizes the US can exploit. Instead of the US being forced to adopt the globalist model the US can force the world to adopt its own new model. One expects that when Trump recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos to paraphrase the great economist Shumpeter’s own paraphrase of Marx “all that’s solid melted into air.” A system that has seemed as inevitable as the sun coming up in the morning or the moon coming out at night suddenly was completely changed. A system that was supposed to ensnare all countries in a global model including the US now appears to be a system that gives American exceptionalism a huge advantage over its competitors.
Now we are politically neutral in this site and you can be for or against Trump, but regardless of your political persuasions and opinions good, bad or indifferent regarding globalism, anyone who is being honest has to admit that this use of tariffs at least potentially is pure genius.
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