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Trump himself has a tendency to point to Wall Street for good news about his policies, but he really ought to be phrasing it this way: "Wall Street struggled mightily while Main didn't."
We don't need a little tinkering around the edges of a moribund centralized economy to make investors happy. We need wholesale transformation at the Main Street level - people falling in love with capitalism again and laughing socialist buffoons off the stage.
I was gloomy yesterday about the debt crisis, but if there's one thing that MIGHT turn it around, it would be a seismic movement toward free markets. The demand for small government must increase before a crucial mass of voters will seriously entertain calls for debt reduction.
Just as Big Government is never honest or free of corruption, so Big Government will never be solvent. It's impossible to achieve financial discipline as long as the big spenders have so many tools at their disposal to seduce and frighten voters away from it.
If you make people hungry for economic liberalization by giving them a taste of rising employment, rising wages, and entrepreneurial growth, they might lose their appetite for maternal statism. They stop thinking about falling into the safety net and think about opportunities.
And they become aware of the COST of socialism, which is always the rub. If voters place a high value on free market opportunities and upward mobility, they keenly appreciate the real price of pie-in-the-sky socialist promises. They ask tough questions about the price tag.
We also need to reconnect the working, managerial, and investment classes. When people believe those groups are static and at odds with each other, squabbling over slices of a stale economic pie, they become vulnerable to socialist appeals. It's the essence of Marxist strategy.
That's why an economy focused on Wall Street pays few political dividends in favor of capitalism. It's why Mitt Romney got clobbered by talking about employers but not employees. It's why leftists are obsessed with "income inequality," glass ceilings, and such.
In theory, sure, large numbers of Americans say they value freedom and they'd rather have jobs than welfare checks. But you have to make it more than theory. You have to show them freedom is valuable, which is another way of saying nothing is truly "free."
And you have to break them out of thinking class is destiny. If they believe their economic fate is fixed and they need government to survive, they will see little value in opportunity. They see themselves as victims of exploitation, not proud owners and salesmen of their labor.
There are social ramifications to these attitudes as well as economic results. It's all tied together. It should be plain as day by now that "social issues" cannot be firewalled from "economic issues," or fiscal conservatism/liberalism separated from social ideology.
(The Left never really believed that, by the way. Their goal was to trick moderates and conservatives into believing it while they fused their own morality and economic nostrums into a unified ideology. It worked.)
If I were Trump, I wouldn't just take a victory lap over the latest astounding job numbers or jeer at the critics for being wrong again. I would explain WHY, and where we can go from here. This is the real Resistance. Capitalism is the true revolutionary ideology. /end
