Frank's Musings

The judgment of the majority of people in entertainment-soaked societies has been corrupted by their reliance on the messages that are most effectively communicated. Instead of thinking for themselves and listening to influencers who present their arguments in anticipation of thoughtful audiences, they have been conditioned to accept the messages of those who best use modern communications techniques.

President Trump acts as if Vladimir Putin has agreed to collaborate with him as a partner in a Good Cop Bad Cop routine for handling a presumptuously nationalistic Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But it isn’t just a routine for Putin. The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, pointed out that without a cease-fire, the whole melodrama only disguises the Russian leader’s relentless megalomania.

Trump believes his voters, like him, are more motivated by self-image than by economic gain. If he really did his best to help them achieve that goal, his administration would tax companies that invest overseas to hire foreign workers to lower their production costs instead of taxing consumers for buying imported goods. The objective of this policy would be artificially to equalize labor costs from market to market and to raise the U.S. employment rate.

Of course, this benefit would cause inflation in the American economy and result in higher-cost living worldwide. That is not much of a concern for high income consumers in comparison to the hoi polloi. Investors in search of increased ROI won’t favor such a strategy. But that is not important to a prestige-hungry narcissist, like Donald Trump. His politics are contemptuous of both ends of the wealth spectrum.