Trump has replaced anyone that disagrees with his vision of how things are, not how things should be, bear in mind that these are very different things. One is something we could prove, the other is a trajectory wish. The reason he does this is he wants to be able to say things to the American people that are simply not true and get away with it by virtue of the fact that there are little or no stats that can be produced to fact check his regular statements.
The essence of a confidence trick is to fool someone into acting a certain way based on information that is misleading, incorrect, or missing. So sometimes half the story, sometimes the wrong story, sometimes no story at all. Controlling the narrative is more important than controlling the machine, and it’s likely easier and getting more so since the removal of expertise from positions of interpretive necessity. A curve, something regularly used in science so as to understand a measured outcome for the purpose of plotting or manipulating a trajectory, is not an easy thing to understand. For the casual observer the representation of statistics or patterns can be baffling and may lead to errors of judgement. Bear this also in mind, that casual observers, you and I that is, not knowing how to read data, will inevitably get conclusions and meanings wrong and may be susceptible to manipulation by those we choose to interpret on our behalf. We see this all the time in life outside the lab, and if it’s bad enough it has a name – maladjusted thinking (a psychological term, sometimes to do with associating occurrences and outcomes to an actor with the intention to inhibit us personally), assigning agency and deliberated actions maybe where there has been none.
To measure is to improve – these are the words of Adam Smith, the great economist. What he captures is the notion that nothing unknown can be improved, we must get to the root of why something works the way it does, what processes and materials are involved, how much does it cost in terms of time and labour, and all this must be done before we could imagine an alternative that might be better. So we measure and we record and we trend and we analyse until we know in detail the facets of the object or procedure. Time and motion, goods compared to their alternatives, human labour or machinery, externalities and opportunities created, person intelligence or AI, which of these is best, all are a consideration. We then form a theory and go on to test it, measuring all the while, taking into account everything we learn from both endeavours and deciding if we have been successful or not, if it is worth changing the now.
I’ve previously stated that capitalism drives innovation whereas monopolies do not because they do not usually need to. This means government funded entities will have a tendency to stagnate and lose efficiency when compared to other parts of the overall market. This does not mean a monopoly could be improved by being moved from public control to being controlled by a private enterprise and guarantee a better outcome. I think the whole of the UK has realised this is not so by now. In general what did happen with water, energy, healthcare, security, railways etc, was privatisation proved that capitalist companies will act to rest or retard innovation if they do not face competition in their market. So they stop measuring with a goal to improve because there is no other company eating into their profits by increasing productivity through innovation. This is likely the most important and justifying component of a capitalist marketplace, that competition drives innovation and improvement. 2nd world countries made no improvements, their “command” economies prevented impetus. 3rd world countries are underresourced yet tend to be highly innovative.
Trump has turned the US into a command economy of sorts. What I mean is that previous administrations would have sat back and let the market decide what is best while they merely regulated or concentrated on infrastructure, often lauding a ‘light touch’ or ‘small government’ sort of liberalism, but as soon as a government intervenes or takes a financial interest in a sector then capitalism falls away because the market is no longer acting in reaction to the demand created through offers of a better personal existence toward citizens who then choose how to spend (capitalism is based on desire, not necessity). By a government becoming a biasing influence taking interest in the prominence of any single supplier/provider the chances of another supplier jumping into a market to challenge that firm diminishes, and so the component of capitalism that makes it acceptable and beneficial to the citizenry disappears. It then just looks like greedy people gaining a revenue stream by cozying up to the government. Of course this will lead to stagnation of innovation, we know this because we can measure the existing nationalised monopolies, it always happens when government directs markets and it always likely will.
This happened in the UK during the Covid supply chain changes that created a “fast lane” of suppliers, where existing suppliers could not compete with companies that were favoured by the government, possibly because of familial links to parliamentarians. It is demonstrable that most of the favoured firms held no reasonable claim on the production or supply of the equipment needed since the firms that were prejudiced out by this scenario were already in the business and if speed and quality were to be the goals then they would have been the obvious direction to turn. Their losses should have been a scandal and some ministers should now be held to account for what appears to most to be self-serving acts of network building and opportunism. Since the US has very little in the way of nationalised services (necessity not desirable), it is awash with private interests unashamedly attempting to capture government money that will allow them to reap a greater than competitive market profit. Like we said before there is no competition so there is a lower spend to advertise, to compete, and most importantly to innovate.
In the UK we have the same thing because of Thatcher (a previous prime minister) who believed strongly in market based economics steering in all things. Now I am not going to state that she wasn’t partially correct, that markets tend to create innovation and drive down prices it’s true, and for the consumer that is no bad thing, but she left out the insight that we have already discovered, stagnation, not because she was not smart enough to realise that it would be the case, but because she knew that the lag, the resulting crumble under the burden that public services would face, would be many years down the road and someone else’s problem to solve. In her time she could create a certain type of prosperity and stimulate growth, which we cannot deny happened. Again I’ll stress that she would not have been ignorant of the downsides of this move. Professor David Harvey says “capitalism doesn’t solve its problems, it just pushes them into the future”. That future is now and everything is noticeably shit to put it mildly. We cannot swim in our rivers because they are full of sewage, a train journey costs a fortune and it’s hit and miss if the train will be on time or running at all, the NHS is crumbling because of PFIs and supply chain constraints, affordable domicile rental stock is diminished, and education has competitive objects that relate more to financial stability rather than actual teaching.
I’m pretty sure at this point if you are still a Conservative (UK or US) voter then I just don’t want to converse with you any longer. If you’ve been a Conservative voter all your life and you’re older than me then you did this. The measurement I have been talking about is in your shopping bill, it’s in your four week wait for a doctors appointment, it’s in the filthy river and the late train and the high rents and the homeless on the pothole filled streets, and if you didn’t notice the infrastructure crumbling and the social fabric falling, didn’t notice the hatred of anyone that is different to us being foisted on all by semi-charismatic charlatans with rich friends and flash cars who promise they have all the answers, then you are a moron and if there is any justification for limiting the vote you make that argument.
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