Pro Commerce

Trump at the end of the first year

I first became a Trump supporter when I learned from Mark Steyn that Trump had filled a large auditorium in New Hampshire in January 2016.

I had run political campaigns for a decade in the ‘60s and ‘70s I I never saw that kind of enthusiasm. By March I told all my friends in Tokyo to expect a Trump victory. They all reminded me of that this year 2017 because no one else ever warned them.

So, I have had an open mind about Trump and politics ever since then.

After his first year I want to weigh in on something new.  Many people are saying that his first year of astounding accomplishments make him one of the greatest president in our history.

I will go further, based on the rockstar reception he is getting from screaming mature women these days: he may be one of the greatest people in American history since the founding fathers. (As important as Hamilton, Washington and Madison.)

Who else has had the impact on America that Trump has had?  Some inventors like Edison and the Wright Brothers?  Some businessmen like Rockefeller, Ford, J.C. Penney, A.P.Sloan, A.P. Giannini, Thomas Watson or Sandy Weill?

Of course Trump has many years to be President and many years to be in public life.  Rising stars in politics like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger have gone on to political ignominy.  

That serves as a caution for me.

What worries me and why start-ups won’t in Paris.

The real problem in the world is that modernity was an accident.  

We don’t appreciate that.  So comments like ‘the arc of justice bends towards…’ reflects all the forces of government, tribalism, hereditary status and status quo that kept the modern world from happening for the past 2,000 years.

Tribalism and hereditary elites have been and still are the powerful forces in the world that have maintained the status quo all this time.  Science and its real driver, technology, will not change the world enough to create or maintain the atmosphere of modernity and modern commerce.

Note that a brilliant computer was built by the Greeks nearly 2500 years ago (antikythera) and that didn’t bring about modernity or modern commerce.  The same is true for moveable type, paper, gunpower, number theory, decimal fractions, modern math, diabetes treatment, modern geology and astronomy that date back hundreds and thousands of years in China with no sign of modernity or modern commerce.

Science and technology don’t have their own momentum in a society that is tribal like most of the human groups on the planet.  It certainly has no chance in well developed societies with hereditary elites like most of the rest of the world; where the elites maintain the status quo like Paris.

It requires that humans be free from tribalism and hereditary elites.

England provided the first escape with the management of their commercial empire which sent talented men outside of the hereditary elite off to faraway places where their talent emerged.  Then America did the same with its rebellion and the great freedom of moving Westward to an open continent. Hereditary elites were thwarted and modernity had a chance to thrive.   None of that can be duplicated again.  America, the stepchild of England, and its commercial empire, will not happen again.  It can not happen in a settled static world.

Israel is the closest modern similarity to America and It may have a problem escaping an hereditary elite in such a small territory. Israeli's coming to America's West Coast may be a source of survival.

Nowhere in the world can you create a start-up culture like America. Nowhere like the San Francisco Bay area, the West, where there is no hereditary elite, where the Westward escaping hippies brought optimism and a love of commerce and innovation.

The 'arc of history' is filled with (1) the death culture of Marxism (tribalism converted to government tyranny), government regulation and (2) social climbing that is almost biological and perpetuates hereditary elites.

The accident of America can be destroyed by government regulation which the ancient forces of tribalism and the modern Left seem to carry in their genes.  Modern commerce can come to an end.  The human desire for status quo can do it.  Envy helps too.

I’ve done business consulting with several thousands business, many start-ups.  Every day businesses struggle with government regulation and entrepreneurs typically quit from exhaustion.  Not from new technology and new competition but from the exhaustion of coping with endlessly stifling government regulation.

Donald Trump the first real businessman to become president explained the black death of government regulation in his speech in Poland in 2017. 

That is why I worry about the survival of modern commerce.  The greatest and most beneficent accident to befall the human species.