The Trumpian (or Something) Achievement

By Bill Murchison The media will make of the State of the Union speech what it will -- which wont be much given the medias agenda to discredit or oust the president delivering the speech. We might turn our eyes briefly at least in another direction: what could be called American capabilities. These in the end matter more than rhetorical flourishes legislative proposals or even the disharmonies of the Grammy Awards. (Hillary Clinton -- really!) American capabilities and successes are growing enhancing respect for what Americans can achieve when they put their minds to certain matters: something they havent done for years. Now all of a sudden look. The stock market is flying for the time anyway at supersonic speed; joblessness is down; and economic growth though we could still do better is steadily improving. It would be unreasonable not to note (as the president certainly wont) that the fourth quarter growth rate of 2.6 percent builds on improvements dating from the Obama administration. Improvements -- we might pause right there. Things were improving before the Trump inauguration yet mere improvement isnt the same as sustained and sustainable progress due to overdue reforms such as major tax cuts and the removal of regulatory barriers to growth. However poorly the president understands matters of decorum self-control vocabulary and so forth and so on he has a feel for what works. What works in American terms is freedom. Interest-groupism the ideology of the Obama White House again and again quashed rational discussion of ways to spread prosperity by encouraging prosperity. Arguments that the new tax law has chiefly to do with helping corporations and their wealthy owners -- what a lot of eyewash. Corporations hire people and pay those people the wages they use to buy and sell and save freely or nearly so: without official hindrance; often rightly sometimes wrongly; in commonsense terms; in moral terms. (Moral terms -- theres a topic for another day or preferably a procession of days!) To put it in a more elemental way: Profits good! Losses bad! And speaking of bidness as Molly Ivins in satirical mood used to say: Our oil industry is blowin and goin. The New York Times acknowledges in a major news story that the United States is once more a dominant producer poised to outflank competitors in supplying growing global markets particularly China and India while slashing imports from the Middle East and North Africa. And not coincidentally to augment general American influence in the world diplomatic as well as economic. These wholesome effects flow from the drive and initiative not of government but of individuals and companies particularly those that shaped the revolution in shale oil drilling in spite of scores of bankruptcies and a significant loss of jobs. Their faith -- occasionally their foolhardiness -- paid off without the help of a presidential administration likelier to view oil as a pollutant than a vital limitless resource. As for the Trump administration it sees the big picture. It works to increase offshore drilling and lower the government profile -- logically usefully -- in regulatory matters. A great superstition has always informed discussions of government regulation. It is that enterprisers and entrepreneurs cant be trusted very far. All-knowing Big Brother must in the public interest watch their every move and direct their every footfall. The Obama administration bought into the mood of mistrust that this worldview encourages: forcing enterprisers to work around the regulators the overseers in order to get things done. Small wonder you might say in that Barack Obama himself was almost pure intellect pure voice. He had upon becoming president no more conversance with capitalism and the profit motive than with shell craters and the manual of arms. He owned as he said a pen and a phone. Knowledge of human achievement and its wellsprings an instinct to understand rewards -- in such presidential essentials he gave elaborate shows of deficiency. Lengthy too is the list of Trumpian deficiencies. Nonetheless that certain things need doing and that in one way or another theyre getting done -- the Schumers and Pelosis may not care. But look: Theyre getting done.