America: Beached Yacht?
by
Bruce A. Blodgett
It all started with folks like industrious Benjamin Franklin, one of the early quintessential entrepreneurs who wrote an autobiography that outlined his successes and how he achieved them. It was a short book that lies deep in the ancestry of “The Art of the Deal.”
Franklin’s book highlights thirteen virtues that are key to achieving perfection, one of which is HUMILITY. There is no tongue-in-cheek here. Franklin is serious. Yes, you can attain perfection and humility is part of the deal. All you have to do is imitate Jesus and Socrates. Apparently Franklin thought that wasn't shooting a bit too high and that it did not reflect perhaps just a wee troy ounce of hubris.
The word hubris naturally leads me to the election of Donald Trump, a businessman’s businessman, a secular savior or so an electoral college’s empowered minority of Americans believe. Trump is no modern version of Franklin. He is not an experienced diplomat, or inventor, or frugal small businessman. He has never held elected office. He is a real estate mogul who operates a family multinational business. He has essentially experienced a virgin re-birth straight into the Presidency of the United States.
One of the figures from American mythology Trump reminds me of is Jay Gatsby. As you may recall, James Gatz, a midwestern farm boy, starts out practicing the Franklin (morphed into Horatio Alger) virtues at home as a boy but finds a shortcut by boarding a tycoon’s yacht on one of the Great Lakes and is introduced to the lifestyle of the robber barons at the end of the Nineteenth Century. From then on, the end justifies the means. Shortcuts are the way. He is involved in bootlegging and fixing the 1919 World Series in order to try to obtain the unobtainable flower of his eye (Daisy Buchanan).
Trump differs from Gatsby not only in terms of treatment of women, attention span, attention seeking, and scale of wealth but most importantly he never had to board anyone else’s yacht other than his father’s. Trump’s shortcut was direct inheritance. In short, neither Gatsby nor Trump were self-made in the Horatio Alger or Franklin sense. They took shortcuts.
Shortcuts are a form of expedience. Expedience is very much a value associated with business. If there is an easier, cheaper way to do something, a successful business will find it or some other business will. That is the alleged efficiency ethos of the market economy.
Government, in turn, is meant to act, at least in some minds, as a referee and infrastructure manager for business. For example, after WWII, President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system so that we could move commerce quickly and in large volume across state lines. It also served as a means of moving military equipment and personnel from one part of the country to another more quickly if necessary during the Cold War. Furthermore, through graduated taxation, the greatest burden of financing infrastructure fell on the shoulders of the most wealthy individuals and corporations.
But when the most powerful businesses are no longer national but broadly international, a particular national government is no longer in a position either to referee or to tax a corporation with any long-term leverage. The corporation will simply relocate its headquarters to the lowest taxing, least legally strict national entity where it does business and leverage all others to drop their rates and laws to match.
The only answer to this is for national governments to form alliances to gain leverage over multinational corporations. For a national government to unilaterally negotiate with such behemoths is like a caveman wth a sling trying to manage a mammoth.
Trump thinks, as evidenced thus far, that all he needs to do is toss a flurry of Executive Orders at the world and thereby shortcut his way to reigning in all sorts of entities, be they Mexicans, Muslims, Australia, Iran, or multinational corporations. It is a wonder he hasn’t landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished.
His undiplomatic manner and hard-nosed bargaining may work with contractors but not with countries. “America First” will inevitably make the rest of the world feel second rate and cause them to isolate America further and leave it economically adrift.
Trump can appeal to, lower taxes on, or put visible pressure on large corporations to stay home and provide more domestic jobs, but all the manipulation in that direction ignores the very market forces that prompted globalization to begin with. Sooner or later, deals with all national players will be necessary, and those will be multinational in nature, not country-to-country. Otherwise, corporations will withdraw from arbitrarily leveraging nations and leave them high and dry, like beached yachts.
Donald is not the deal-maker he imagines himself to be. A deal-maker does not undermine his credibility with tasteless, petty, paltry, self-withering Tweets. Despite all the king’s horses and all the king’s yes-people manufacturing “alternative" facts about approval ratings and supportive crowd size, Donald’s stock has dropped precipitously among Americans paying attention to what is going on.
Both Franklin and Gatsby had the capacity to be patient and deliberate in pursuing long-term goals. Trump shows no such capacity. Already he has reduced both the office and himself through overreaching and reckless expedience. He has alienated career diplomats and civil servants in large numbers. The next deal he negotiates should be with himself to become less the tyrannical child tantrum-maker and more the magnanimous, far-sighted leader the world needs right now.
Don’t hold your breath.
