Does Trump Think America Is A Department Store? Why He’s WRONG On Trade And Tariffs

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Sorry, Donald, the United States is not a department store. We also want to maybe throw this in here. It looks like we’re all socialists now. Yeah, the department store analogy. Eric Boehm had a great piece and reason about this. We’ve had a myriad of different reasons for why we are imposing

tariffs, taxes, okay? And once you start thinking in your head, tariffs are taxes. Taxes that are gonna make the country rich and strong. It’s gonna boost tax revenue, reduce the trade deficit, and we’re gonna have leverage in future trade negotiations. The latest here, and again, he’s running with this. He’s running with this. I guess it, maybe it’s,

you know, certain people. that sounds good. Yeah, yeah, United States is like Bloomingdale’s. Just like Bloomingdale, Trump’s running a store. Right. Trump’s the general manager. General manager of department store USA. And I quote, think of us as a super luxury store, a store that has the goods. Again, he was.

saying this when he was having his meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. You’re gonna come and you’re gonna pay a price and we’re gonna give you a really good price. Last month in an interview with Time Magazine, Trump also said that America was a department store and we set the price. I meet with the companies and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price.

Who knows he may come up with another analogy over the next couple weeks. I don’t know because he comes up with things all the time. country’s not a department store.

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think of the country as a collectivist, that’s socialist. I mean, I’ve been saying this a lot lately. It’s kind of a neo-Marxist idea that he’s been coming up with, and it really does fit. Now, again, I’m sorry, people. You might not like what I have to say, but challenge me. Listen to what I have to say, OK? Hear the facts, OK?

President of the United States is not a CEO. Okay, it’s not. I don’t work for the President of the United States. I’m not an employee of DJT. Okay, I’m not. He doesn’t have the right to determine what fair prices for transactions for individuals. I don’t care in or out of the country.

Every single part of the department store analogy, quite frankly, is ridiculous. in the piece, in the piece, Bohm writes here, so let’s set aside, let’s set aside the idea that Trump is wrong. We’ll say Trump is right, America is a big store, and we have the goods. Kind like the Arby’s commercial, we have the meats. Well, we’ve got the goods, and the president is the shopkeeper.

So we’re going to run this as Donald Trump says he’s running it. First, Donald Trump has basically told all of the suppliers of Department Store USA to go take a long walk off a short pier. We’re all set. We’re all stocked up here. We don’t need you suppliers anymore. We’re not going to spend any money on new inventory. That what he told Carney. said, we don’t.

We don’t want Canadian steel. We don’t want Canadian aluminum. We don’t want Canadian lumber. We don’t need any of their stuff. Well, many American companies do want Canadian steel, Canadian aluminum, and Canadian lumber. Again, these are raw materials, raw materials, parts that we need that go into a myriad of different items.

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stuff that manufacturers need to make things. Go back to the department store. So Donald Trump, he’s a shopkeeper. He thinks he’s saving money by refusing to buy products from suppliers. He said it again and again and again. So now the shopkeeper, okay, Donald Trump.

Yep, we’re going to raise the price on everything in the store because that’s going to bring in more revenue. OK, that’s that’s good. know, basically, we’re going to be making more because of these tariffs. Here we go. Mission accomplished. Well, in the real world, customers are going to buy fewer things because of the higher prices. Eventually, the inventory will be depleted.

So we’ve got a store that has higher prices, making it less competitive to alternatives, going to have fewer customers, it’s going to have empty shelves. And again, we the employees are going to start looking around saying who’s going to get fired first.

And not to mention you’ve already ticked off all of your suppliers. You might have a more difficult time getting anybody to sell you anything. Everybody in this equation is worse off. Everyone in this equation is worse off. Suppliers, they’re selling less. Customers pay higher prices. Employees lose their job. Store goes out.

business. There’s a buying and selling component to capitalism. Get it? Department stores, they have to buy and sell things. No one will get rich. No one is going to get rich in a capitalist society by hoarding and price gouging customers.

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Nobody. Okay. I called it neo Marxist and been talking about this for some time. I’ve also made the comparisons in the past talking about the country and our economic direction comparing it almost like a Mussolini Italy, which is nationalism. Nationalism inherently is socialism. If you actually think about it. Great writer. I have a great deal of respect.

for, I’ve cited him over the years, Kevin Williamson just put out a piece and echoing, echoing many of my sentiments here and he’s a brilliant writer. Starts it off, Donald Trump is a socialist. I know, oh no, not Kamala Harris, not Bernie Sanders, no, cackling socialist. Most people don’t even know what socialist means. You’re gonna ask, know, ask a lot of people what socialist is.

throw some sort of woke stuff at you. They’re going to start talking about welfare and welfare state. Wrong! Socialism has nothing to do with welfare. Okay? I remember I talked about this on the show where you had the lefties here in this country and I think was Bernie Sanders and his ilk talking about the wonders of Scandinavia and their socialist economy and they got ticked. They’re like, we’re not socialist.

We’re not socialist. have a large safety net. We have a bit of a welfare state, but there’s a big difference. Socialism, Williamson writes, doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social welfare apparatus and is far from socialist. Singapore.

is super capitalist and it has all sorts of welfare. Actually gives direct money to poor people. Scandinavians, like I said, have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the post-war decades. Even in Europe, okay? A lot of progressives love, look at all the stuff that they have in Europe, all the free healthcare.

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They have been slowly and again slowly but surely moving away from state owned enterprises and central planning little by little. Again, they’ve got nothing on we here in the United States, but they’re heading in that direction. Socialism is not, mean, it’s not government funded education or retirement benefits, healthcare subsidies. That’s welfare.

Two completely different things. Socialism. Socialism is a centrally planned economy. It is dominated by state action, irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps, welfare. Socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores.

But more often it means the state apparatus that runs the farms and the grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating terms of employment and determining how business is to be done. Okay? Lenin. Lenin said his ideal society as one managed as though it was one big factory. One big factory. Sound familiar? How about one?

big department store. Essentially, Lenin and Trump are saying the same thing. Trump talks about this, and I’ve discussed this for some time here, this golden age of America. Golden age of America is like post-civil war leading up to the robber barons, gilded age type stuff. The robber barons, and many of I’ve talked about this before, even Andrew Carnegie would have loved

Love for socialism. Love that if we headed down that path, went further down that path because why you would have been the only game in town? Only game in town. again, it’s a thought, we’re richer at this point in time. the production was more efficient. We eliminate wasteful duplication in work and products and destructive competition. That’s the robber barons wanted.

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Williamson writes, Lenin did not dream up the idea of society as one big factory on his own. American capitalists got there before him.

Donald Trump doesn’t know, let’s be honest, come on, you really think he knows how a factory operates, department store operates? And quite frankly, you know the amount of people that work on Wall Street, private equity, again, some of these so-called wizards are smart that he has working in his administration, know, Fox News pundits, you think that they get it?

You think that those, even the people, the pundits out there, and they start talking about the economy, it’s embarrassing, quite frankly. They don’t know. They don’t know what they don’t know, but they claim to know how the world works, how a business works. Again, I’ve railed about this for a long time when it comes to professors and so-called experts out there, their theories. They’ve never done it. They’ve never signed the front of a check.

Never had to go out to build anything, create anything, market anything. Again, these are the people that are around. Donald Trump, yeah, he understands. mean, again, he sold products in Macy’s. Again, a department store. You remember the Donald Trump clothes that they had there got discontinued? One way to describe it is,

Gordon Gekko meets Liberace. Let’s just leave it at that. Anyway.

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This is Trump’s version of a quasi-monarchal Leninism. It’s one big Macy’s and Donald Trump is leading the parade. And I’m gonna quote Donald Trump directly here. We are a department store and we set the price. I meet with the companies and then I set a fair price. What I consider to be a fair price and they can pay it.

or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries, some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every

almost every country in the world, in the entire world. So I will set a price and when I set the price and I will set it fairly according to the statistics and according to everything else. I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store and I set

prices and I’ll say if you want to shop here this is what you have to pay.

End quote.

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Okay, so we got a United States giant department store run by a guy who has no clue on how a department store.

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Williamson writes, and this is funny, if you ask the president what the US balance of trade with Ertria is, should or should be, and if you then explain to him that unlike Namvia, okay, Ertria is a country, he’ll give you an answer, dumb answer, but the problem won’t be that the answer goes off in one direction or another, but that he and people like him,

actually think that there is an answer. Again, what do I mean by that? Well, it’s gotta be an answer. I spoke about this several weeks ago. We talked about iPencil and the beauty of the free market. Okay, he thinks that there’s an answer to this and it’s his job or the federal government’s job to provide one and actually act on it.

and that the President of the United States can somehow determine, according to the statistics and everything else, what it should be.

When asked what the United States should be getting in reciprocal from Canada, he didn’t have a clue. He said friendship.

said friendship. According to everything else, that’s what he said, statistics and according to everything else.

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Just take a grocery store. Williamson gives this example, and this is math. Play a little math game here. Grocery store has anywhere between 40 to 50,000 unique products. If you want to determine what the correct price of each product should be, even within a fairly narrow range and how much product should be stocked relative to current inventory, again, within a fairly narrow range,

throw in a few other important variables, and then consider all the possible permutations, you end up with a number of possible distributions expressed by a number that has about 200,000 digits. Now, if you took one second to consider each possibility, because of course, you are the great central planner, you run the store, and you’re so smart, you can consider every option.

It would take you more time to run the numbers for a single suburban grocery store than has passed since the Big Bang. All the time in the world wouldn’t be enough.

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So you think Trump is gonna figure out what the price of imported bananas should be from country X relative to country Y because of course he knows all and sees all.

You think that, right? Okay. This is classic. This is what we are. Donald Trump, this is classic socialism. Classic socialism or nationalism. They’re basically the same thing. Nationalized industries are socialized industries. Socialized industries are nationalized industries. Nationalized medicine is socialized medicine.

Jonah Goldberg wrote that. Barack Obama, Barack Obama’s economic views that we railed against were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man, can sit there at a desk and he’s gonna be able to move.

chess pieces on a board. That’s what socialism is all about. You know, the joke is that the tyrants in Moscow back in the day, they, you know, they had a committee. You know, they had a committee of experts that would, they would see what was necessary to manage the economy according to their scientific principles.

Trump thinks he can do it all by himself. He didn’t need a committee. Okay. This is funny because I’m a big Monty Python fan. I also, he talks about, know, high X road to serfdom, which I’ve called over the years, I call it, know, highway to hell, road to serfdom, highway to hell. This is Monty Python’s version of Trump’s policies.

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These policies are going to make it more expensive to buy Christmas presents for my kids. Well, maybe your kids don’t need so many presents. But wasn’t your plan supposed to make us all rich? It will. Think of all the money you’ll save when you can’t afford to buy anything.

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That’s what we’re dealing.

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and again,

There’s no conservative, there’s no Republican party. mean, you got, know, Rand Paul, Thomas Massey, most of the other Republicans are running and hiding the ones that.

and make fun of the Russians and their five-year plans and the Chinese and their various different plans from wheat production. And again, now they’re all, you know, they’re bending the knee. They’re bending the knee to comrade Trump.

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They’re not. Because Trump knows, he gives him rights, Trump knows, comrade Trump knows where the Hallmark channel should be filming its next Christmas theme rom-com and what percentage of subcomponents for the flux capacitors should be manufactured in Canada.

It’s not Kamala Harris, not a cackling socialist. It’s not Adam Smith. It’s not Milton Friedman. This is not Ronald Reagan. Congratulations, we’re socialist. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.