Persuasion carries an excerpt from my book, stitching together several parts from Chapter 5, “I Own the Store,” where I write about Donald Trump’s program of economic controls.
Check it out here:
This is only an excerpt, and there’s a lot more on this topic in the book. There are two larger conclusions that I draw from this.
The first is the illusion of what we might call “authoritarian capitalism.” There are some people who have talked themselves into supporting Trump on the assumption that the Democrats are “socialists,” while Trump would impose free-market policies. And as I point out, “Even Trump’s authoritarianism seems like a selling point to some of these supporters, who are tempted by the idea that he can impose free-market policies that lack sufficient public support to get through Congress.” I continue:
This is one of the great illusions of authoritarianism. The supporters of a strongman see him as the battering ram to push through their long-stymied ideological agenda. They give him unchecked power so he can do the things they want him to do. But once he has that power, he does the things he wants to do.
More deeply, “There is an inexorable logic in authoritarianism that always turns strongmen against economic freedom and free markets. They fear competing centers of power, which includes independent sources of wealth and resources, particularly in the media industry, that might be used by their political opponents.”
But the real lesson I want people to draw from this is that we think, because of the political legacy of the 20th Century, that the opposite of “capitalism” is “socialism.” Yet historically, there are many other ways of organizing a society that are fundamentally opposed to capitalism.
We are used to thinking of free markets and capitalism as the established economic system, the status quo protected by conservatives and vested interests. But it is worth remembering that capitalism was once a radical new system that swept away the vested interests that came before it, replacing feudalism and aristocracy. Those are the older and more primitive economic systems Trump is attempting to revive.
Check out the excerpt and recommend it to others. And if you have not bought the book yet, go do so.
Also, now that some of you have had a chance to read the book, please go leave a review at Amazon and recommend it wherever you can. That helps a lot.
Like I said, there’s a lot more on this topic in the book, and even then, I knew I that as soon as I finished the book, Trump was going to do more things. The most recent is his arbitrary imposition, out of the blue, of a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants.
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