This was a bad week for anybody
who believed for five nanoseconds that Donald Trump was going to get anything
through Congress.
The vote on ObamaCare was postponed again.
ObamaCare is now permanent. Trump is never going to get enough votes to replace
it with something else, which would have been worse anyway. The monstrosity
should be repealed. It should not be replaced by anything. But once the
Democrats ram some welfare state policy down the throats of the Republicans,
the Republicans never repeal it. Their constituents get their hands on money from
Uncle Sugar, and they will not tolerate a repeal of the law which gives them
access to the money. In other words, the voters like the welfare state as long
as it benefits them. There is no philosophical opposition among the American
people to the expansion of government wealth redistribution.
Then
there is NAFTA. Trump campaigned on a promise to get this country out of
bondage to NAFTA. This week, Trump said that he is going to stick with NAFTA.
He is simply going to renegotiate parts of it. Big deal. Fat chance.
That
law was a monstrosity from day one. Surrendering American sovereignty to some
international organization is always a bad idea. From a philosophical
standpoint, getting a better deal out of NAFTA is a bad idea. It means
surrendering to the idea of the transfer of any national sovereignty to an unelected
agency of the New World Order. A better deal can always be renegotiated later
by another President to turn it into a worse deal. There is only one deal worth
considering: getting out now. That deal is now off the table.
So,
those conservatives who naïvely thought that Trump was going to get ObamaCare
repealed now know that he isn't going to be able to do this. He doesn't have
the votes in Congress. Congressional Republicans never have the stomach for
repealing anything that the Democrats get passed into law. Other conservatives,
who recognize that NAFTA has been a disaster philosophically, now know that
they are not going to see the USA pull out of NAFTA.
ObamaCare
is now going to go the way of all flesh. It is an economic disaster, and it is
going to become a much worse economic disaster. The Democrats will get blamed,
but not entirely. Because the Republicans have twice refused to overturn it,
they now are up to their eyeballs in responsibility for it. The good news is
this: when the Democrats come back into power during the next recession, they
will probably not repeal it. Their fingerprints are all over it. Nancy Pelosi
rammed it through the House of Representatives. The Democrats' Left wing wants
a single-payer system where the government funds the whole thing, but the Left
didn't get that through in 2010, and I don't think it's going to get it in the
future. They may. Democrats may figure they have the votes, and they might as
well replace ObamaCare with something much worse. But I think it is going to
stay on the books. It is not full-scale socialized medicine.
I
had thought that Trump might get us out of NAFTA. That was the only thing he
promoted in his campaign that I thought he might pull off. Now, he has waffled.
He is pretending that he has the ability to renegotiate bits and pieces of the
law. I doubt that he has ever read the law. He thinks of himself as a
negotiator. In politics, negotiations are not the same as they are in business.
The criteria of success are different. Negotiations in business mean that
people on both sides are trying to get money. Negotiations in politics mean
that people on both sides are trying to get power. NAFTA already provides power
to non-politicians. It was the transfer of power from politicians to faceless bureaucrats
who are not elected. This is what the New World Order always wants. It is what
it usually gets.
As
long as the bureaucrats remain in control of policy, which is forever unless
NAFTA is abandoned by the US government, they don't care if Trump gets this or
that point renegotiated. Enforcement will always be in the hands of the
bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats ignore the politicians except on rare
occasions. The politicians are not in charge. The bureaucrats are in charge.
That's why NAFTA is a disaster. It is going to remain a disaster.
The
Trump Presidency is demonstrating clearly to anybody who bothers to pay
attention that nothing is going to change in Washington, except possibly to get
worse if he gets us into a war. Any hope that a Trump supporter has that
anything fundamental is going to change in Washington is simply another example
of people believing that the Punch and Judy show in Washington has anything to
do with the real power in Washington, which is the power of unelected
bureaucracy.
There
are two ways to reduce the power bureaucracy. One is to cut their budgets. This
is never done. Second, politicians can repeal the law that created the agency.
This is also never done. The power of administrative law continues to expand.
Congress is peripheral once it passes a law.
ObamaCcare
is going to be funded. The Republicans are not going to repeal it. NAFTA is
going to be funded. The Republicans are not going to repeal it.
Congressional
Republicans are part of the system. There is no way that Trump or anybody else
is going to get these people to vote against the welfare state. Once a law is
on the books, Republicans are not going to repeal it. They have too many
constituents in their districts with their arms into the loot up to their
elbows or shoulders.
Trump
is not philosophically committed to limited government. It would take a
philosophically steadfast President to repeal ObamaCare and pull out of NAFTA.
Trump is not a philosophically steadfast President.
So,
sit back and watch the show. The liberal media hate Trump, despite the fact
that he is impotent. They love Obama, despite the fact that he is visibly on
the take of Wall Street, as his $400,000 speech indicates.
Anybody
who believes that national politics will change anything significant will spend
his whole life dreaming of victory, and then holding his nose when victory
supposedly is achieved.
