In his speech yesterday, Donald Trump had an excellent line:
[Hillary] Clinton “gets rich making you poor.”
This is truer than even Donald Trump may know.
It’s not just Hillary Clinton. It’s the nature of government intervention in the economy. When government intervenes in the economy, it disrupts rational business transactions. Rational business transactions refer to exchanges where people are free to act in what they judge as their own best interests. Inevitably, government manipulation takes the focus off pleasing customers and making profits and instead places the emphasis on pleasing politicians.
The skill of politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton? They disrupt economic activity by taxing, regulating, and subsidizing favored businesses, granting special favors to people who do them favors (or donate to the Clinton Foundation), etc. They’re no different from most other politicians in this respect. What makes them different is they do it on a scale so unprecedented, and so breathtakingly brazen, that people can hardly believe it. It’s much more scandalous than any corruption you’ll see on a show like Netflix’s House of Cards. Most people dismiss the evidence as the stuff of fiction, because certainly nobody — not in America — could be as corrupt as this, could they?
When a politician rewards company “A” by loosening up on taxes or regulations at the expense of company “B,” or by up and coming company “C,” then it hampers or undermines rational economic activity. At this point, politicians turn on the class warfare “logic” by saying, “We’re helping the little guy at the expense of the fat cats. “ No such thing is true. What actually happens is the politicians reward and create fat cats by subverting the laws of the marketplace and replacing them with political considerations. In a free market economy, businesses survive or perish on their ability to please customers; in a politicized Clinton-like economy, businesses survive or perish on their ability to acquire pull with corrupt, sinister narcissists posing as caring do-gooders.
In a free market, where government does absolutely nothing other than prosecute frauds or violent criminals, this could not happen. Corruption is always possible, because human beings will always possess the free will to be honest or dishonest. But by staying out of the marketplace, government would remove the possibility of political corruption on the scale we see with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill and Hillary Clinton would have no place in a free market economy. They would not be wealthy, and there would be no basis for them to acquire power; they would be the nobodies they deserve to be.
Ayn Rand called this the “aristocracy of pull.” When we give government power over economic activity it does not deserve, it elevates corrupt people like the Clintons, along with most other career politicians (both parties) in rewarding the favored rich and stealing from the poor or the middle class, who will miss out on opportunities in the process. It’s also stealing from the honest, good companies who don’t need or want political pull, not to mention the businesses that will never come into existence because of how government thwarts economic growth.
Capitalism gets the blame for all this corruption and pull. That’s why we don’t have a candidate who advocates capitalism. To most people, private property and profits are the problem. So they turn to the socialism of Bernie Sanders or the nationalism of someone like Donald Trump, who blames immigration and lack of tariffs as the problem, rather than lack of a free market. By default, we will probably end up with the corrupt power couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton, back at the helm of the power they crave in a manner most of us will never imagine.
Bill and Hillary may well be the duo to preside over the demise of what’s left of the American republic. These sneering power-lusters are skillful at convincing an inattentive, politically and ideologically ignorant public that they really care about the masses. In reality, they hamper and ultimately bring down the economy upon which those “little people” depend upon for survival.
Even if by accident, Donald Trump is right. Hillary Clinton does, in fact, get rich by making other people poor. And the poor ignorant saps who applaud her don’t have a clue.
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