There’s much litter lying around in popular economic discussions. Confusion abounds and drivel spreads when the subject turns to the economy. Most economic understanding doesn’t stretch beyond the popular nose. People go down to the supermarket and can’t afford eggs, or they notice that their young adult offspring can’t afford the American dream. The banalities in the popular discussion of “pocketbook issues” usually ends up becoming an attack on pocketbooks. Not much understanding is apparent. It’s the opening for the demagogue.
How so? Let’s begin with the basics. There are only two kinds of economics: free market economics and poli-sci economics, which is not really economics. Economics is the study of what we do for a living, both in what we produce and trade for, both at the micro (individual) and macro (national) levels. Unstated but essential is the personal freedom to make those decisions, ergo a free market. Once that freedom is curtailed beyond the widely accepted vices, the subject morphs into political science and the role of political functionaries to direct, manage, and plan. More succinctly, self-styled gurus assert the power to decide, not the individual. There’s no such thing as socialist or communist or managed-trade economics. At best, or worst, economics becomes nothing but a subsidiary of politics and the workings of government. The hybrid – an oxymoronic “politicized economics” – gives you a bastardized politics and a bastardized economics.
The Democratic Party, Trump, Vance, and the MAGA movement are all into bastardization. They, in a myriad of ways, desire to direct us toward their grand vision of their better world. The Dems are bedeviled by a 360-degree dread of inequality and the human desire to make nature useful to us. Their economics is politics, the politics of a corpulent and intrusive Leviathan, with the exception of an expanded lane for moral license.
The MAGA crowd envisions an American paradise unspoiled of foreign influences. Theirs is the Eden of 1950s America, a time when our industrial competitors were still recuperating from the battlefields that were once their homes, businesses, and fields. An American head start that began in the 19th century dramatically lengthened post-WWII. But then, by the 1970s, much of the rest of the world came roaring back, and MAGA retaliates with tariff walls.
Did this refashioning of economics into politics make a better world? When taken to its logical conclusion in the many shades of socialism, protectionism, or progressivism, the history is not encouraging, whether in the form of the Soviet Union, Smoot-Hawley, the New Deal, or the many Democrat offspring of their Green New Deal.
Their desperation leads them to glue their eyes and ears to the momentary gyrations of markets and numbers for confirmation, not recognizing that their favorite intrusions take time to broadly impact buyers and sellers. Frankly, Democrats don’t care, but Trump-enthusiasts seem to. Trump declares a tariff war on the world and Trumpers look to trumpet or bury the subsequent news of the consequences.
Thus, the Trump universe reacted to the dramatic fall in security markets after Trump’s early April declaration of a trade war by bellowing that it’s “Wall Street vs. Main Street”. Then markets began to recover once Trump loosened the torture screws (tariffs) in his racking of trade (Trade, by the way, is quintessential economics.). After he backed off, the supply side of the economy with its supply chains began to see light at the end of Trump’s trade-war tunnel. Markets (S&P 500 and the Dow) rebounded to levels before Trump politics were injected in the economic bloodstream. Trumpers are elated at the recapture of lost ground, but not the expulsion of the intruder who caused the retreat.
A healthy economy normally experiences growth, but Trump apologists are ecstatic about treading water. Trump central planning managed to turn an economy that perennially outperforms Europe and Japan into Europe and Japan. It’s even worse. Europe is outperforming us. The economist Dominic Pino crunched the numbers of a $1,000 investment in the S&P 500 and Dow from November 6, 2024 to the second week of May 2025 and compared it to the same input in the stock markets of the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. They beat us (see #1). Make America Great Again (MAGA) should be refashioned into Make America Like Europe (MALE).
Of course, none of this matters much to the true believer. Turning economics into politics, or theology in the case of the true believer, is not only bad economics but it isn’t even economics.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “U.S. Stocks Continue to Underperform European Stocks”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 5/16/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-stocks-continue-to-underperform-european-stocks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth