Dakota Beacon

John Kennedy once used the expression, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”  In this he was right.  His view was actually one of “supply-side” economics recalling the Reagan era, rather than a welfare state.  This difference defines our politics today.  On the one hand we have a party currently led, at least, by a real estate developer and grand scale entrepreneur.  He has, despite his success and wealth, more in common with the salon owner, the neighborhood pub, the guy who owns the comic book shop, the piano teacher, than with the minor bureaucrats, the grant writers, the - let’s face it - less productive members of our society.  The latter tend to lean more toward the party led by the career politician, the one whose deals are made with the public’s money instead of his own.  

Trump has said that success will bring us together.  His is an interesting and colorful amalgam of American society - some rich, some poor, some young, some old, some born of generations of Americans, pioneers, survivors of the Great Depression, others born in foreign lands, refugees from oppression who love freedom, and their children.  He has an amazing array of hyphenated Americans flocking to his cause - African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jewish Americans.  He has cattle ranchers and boaters, processions of bikers and Amish buggies, out-of-work factory workers and frackers, successful businessmen, those who fear a return of Obamacare and prefer the private sector solutions that come naturally to an American entrepreneur.  There are people of all ages to whom the right to worship is all-important, people who fear things like court-packing or eviscerating of the Second Amendment, those who support the right to life, those who would rather invest in their businesses and save for their kids’ futures than pay exorbitant taxes.  And there are those wise enough to view world politics and America’s place in them, our world leadership and our powerful influence for peace as relevant.

It might, on the surface, remind people of the assortment of special interest groups which congregated under the umbrella of Franklin Roosevelt’s many programs.  But there is a strong difference here.  Under FDR, these groups came in as competitors for the national pot, not a team that is working in concert for a win for all.  That is the difference between the finite view of the left - meaning that those on the left see a set and finite amount of wealth that must be divided, and the belief in infinite wealth, common on the right.  It may be one reason those on the left  are always trying to reduce the world population.  It creates a desperate grab for one’s “share” of that little pot.  The other view, the “supply side” view, understands that wealth grows.  To create wealth for oneself it is not necessary to take it from someone else.  This is actually a more traditional view - in the modern classical period - the time when our country was founded - population growth was a measure of a nation’s success and growing wealth.  Only when all wealth comes from the top down is population growth a problem.  When it is organic, bottom-up, the wealth grows as well as the population. 

The difference could not be more stark.  Americans will either choose a path toward energy independence, productivity, protection of Constitutional principles and the Bill of Rights and powerful world leadership which spawns peace and stability - or they will decide to embrace a kind of government which takes care of their needs (they hope) and limits their freedom, they will give the government their earnings, they will suspect each other of getting more than they are getting.  World leadership will devolve back to what it was under Obama - pallets of U.S. currency shipped secretly to Iran, sub-rosa deals with Chinese communists, more discord and strife in the Middle East, perhaps a subservient role in the U.N. again and perhaps even to the E.U., trade deals that impoverish us.  The emphasis will be ever greater on approving abortion, gender dysphoria and grinding the faces of the rest of us into their pavement.  

For my part, for what it’s worth, I’ll throw in with the supply-siders.  I believe that the whole American experience has shown that a rising tide does, indeed, lift all boats.  When frackers are able to go back to work the increase in oil production enriches the less wealthy who need to heat their homes and put gas in their cars.  When other nations are incentivised to succeed they are no longer a source of refugees - the people can stay in their homelands and prosper.  There are no Israeli refugees.  When our rights are protected we can go about our business without looking over our shoulder, afraid the government will shut us down.  When our stock market goes up the elderly are able to benefit because their pensions are tied to this.  Our bitter experience during the Depression was that the less we allowed people to succeed, the more we restricted them, the less wealth there was.  The Depression could have been over in months instead of nearly a decade.  There are ups and downs in every economy.  Ours took a tremendous hit (as did the rest of the world’s) when COVID struck.  But we are recovering faster than more restricted nations elsewhere and if we maintain this trajectory we will emerge better than before - for the simple reason that we would have anyway.