A Musing on Trumpian Fantasies of What the Economy Is: Shovel-Ready Self-Delusions
Start from a deeply deluded place about what the economy is & you are playing a stupid game. & so to the extent that Trump is not stopped and removed from all levers of power immediately, America is going to do nothing but win some very stupid prizes indeed…
A pirate’s miner’s life for me? Trump dreams of a shovel-dug coal-fueled America has not existed for nearly a century—and never will again. False dreams of muscular labor make policy making about creating economic prosperity very difficult indeed. And so we have yet another poster child for the ever-repeated lesson that it is really stupid and counterproductive (for everyone except rich people who care about tax cuts) to elect Republicans.
The choice to sell illusions rather than manage change has been a constant for all except the pro-New Deal faction of Republicans since the days of Herbert hoover. And muscular, dangerous work was never glorious—only necessary. Technological change, global market dynamics, and environmental necessity have moved the American economy far from the pick-and-shovel jobs Trump lionizes. The real insult to American workers lies not in acknowledging change, but in pretending it can be reversed and that the world of 1920 with 800,000 coal miners with picks and shovels is one that we miss. Serious adult conversations technological transformation and how to do it are, as they have been since 1870 if not 1780, urgently needed. And Republicans, unanimously, do all they can to block them from taking place.
Virginia Postrel writes:
Virginia Postrel: Wanted: Manly Jobs for Manly Men <vpostrel.substack.com/p/wanted-…>: ‘Or at least for manly men who don’t have their acts together: Behind much of the MAGA economic agenda lies a concern with restoring manly jobs. Coal miners want to mine! says Donald Trump. “They’re good strong guys,” he says. “That’s what they want to do. They love to dig coal, that’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big, strong hands.”…
J.D. Vance argued that the U.S. needed to crack down on illegal immigration so that businesses would have to pay high wages and hire the seven million prime-age American men who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Some… he acknowledged, might be “struggling with addiction,” but employers shouldn’t give up on their fellow citizens.
I’m sympathetic with… Richard Reeves…. That said, there is a lot wrong with the MAGA story about manly jobs, starting with the desirability of mining coal. Although conditions have improved over time, coal mining is a terrible job…
And she cites what is perhaps the greatest passage ever written, by George Orwell: