Trump's Policies & Corporate Power

As much as you'd like to think otherwise, Trump isn't the devil. He cut taxes, unleashed American energy independence, halved inflation, signed the Abraham Accords, secured the border, and pursued a common sense foreign policy of bringing the troops home and wasn't a trigger-happy lunatic who invaded other countries & launched missiles like Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, and Biden.

Nah he still very much threw peace to the wind. “Unleashing American energy” is another great way of saying “letting corporations walk all over you.”

I'd rather have corporations walk all over me and half $1.89 gas than have the government take their place and have $6 gas.

When was the last time you heard a conservative calling for a gasoline monopoly? Are you just putting those words in conservatives mouths, fallaciously contrasting a Straw Man Argument & attacking a position conservatives never professed to hold again? That's sure what it seems like. Get real here, Trump never called for monopolies.

But he allows them. He does, he will, don’t deny that. When government restriction dies, monopolies grow. It’s not something we can stop unless we regulate it, or the people do so by controlling the corporations themselves. If you advocate for the destruction of corporate regulation, then they will become monopolies. The people alone aren’t strong enough to hold back a monopoly, that’s been long since proven. You may not call for monopolies, but you make the so much easier to allow.

Can you provide an example of Trump allowing a gasoline monopoly, or are you pulling this out of your butt?

I did not say a gas monopoly, and I was referring to monopolies as a whole, I just used your gasoline example as an opening statement for my opinion. Trump however did assist and allow large market mergers to further consolidate power, especially in the tech industry. A politician who allows monopolies doesn’t do so simply by advocating for a single company, what they do instead is they hand those companies more money, strengthen the oil incentives pipelines, and assist in or do nothing about large mergers, such as Sprint or T-Mobile. If a president openly supported monopolies, he&rsquo…  Read more;d be thrown out, but that’s why he makes the process easier. He’s a rich guy himself, he knows the avenues to do the most of what is technically legal. I agree, Trump’s not dumb, which is exactly why he cuts taxes on the rich, strikes down the workers unions and workers rights, then claims he’s the one who made the economy great when All he did was fire workers and cut taxes on the companies that should’ve been taxed the most. That’s not a strategy, that was a purge, and there’s far more coming if he gets back in office. This time, controlling the FDA, destroying the EPA, and using the DOJ as his guard dogs is the plan, along with maximizing a theory to its furthest interpretation to allow him more ability to deregulate the largest businesses and let their own interests flow in. Trump doesn’t have to openly support anything, businesses will do that themselves, he just has to write a few laws, sit back, and watch the corporate power flow.

Apparently your definition of monopoly is "big business." My definition of monopoly is "permanent, 100% control of a given industry." Hope that cleared things up.

Those big businesses keep trying to inch closer and closer to becoming a 100% monopoly, hence the fact that conglomerates and near-monopolies keep trying to come together. Just because they don’t have complete control doesn’t mean they’re not an existential threat.

And can you then not just stop them if and when they become a monopoly? Why do you feel you have to break them up whenever they inch closer to monopoly? Why are you not just satisfied that if that happens, the government break it up?

Because those few sellers in the near-monopoly area far too often give customers their worst days when they reach that stage, regardless of whether they reach 100% monopoly or not, it makes them homogeneous, controllable by one another even, and that reduces any chances they have of actually creating innovation regardless. At a certain point, especially at the near-monopoly area, they don’t end up competing, they intentionally merge for their benefit, destroying competitiveness even if they’re simply inching closer. Apple, Samsung, and Google are examples of this, the only people…  Read more they compete with are the little guys, and then they destroy them in the process, also destroying their competition and making the situation worse. They shouldn’t be allowed to gain a near-monopoly status in the first place, because they’re still a threat to competition even then.

If that's true, why, historically, have monopolies continued to innovate – Standard Oil went from Kerosine to, after the invention of the electric lightbulb, experimenting till they discovered GASOLINE, which powered the growth of all America. Carnegie Steel went from just selling it to trade ships, etc, to creating steel. beams to build skyscrapers. And why did prices continually DROP, despite there being ZERO government regulation, after the creation of these monopolies, Oil prices came down 250%? Can you explain any of this as a socialist?

Once again, remember my comment on a small group of metrics not painting the bigger picture? They drove out all other competition in the process, they destroyed anyone else’s chances, and refused to pay their workers fair wages despite the extreme increase in profits. Gas price drops are worthless if you couldn’t even afford a home or car to live in in the first place. It was because of almost every other metric but profit suffering that the majority of both historians and economists view the Industrial Revolution as a disgraceful time for the American people and workers as a whole, sacrificing everything, all the good of the workers, all for money, growth, and power as if that was all that mattered. It may have been great for the bourgeoisie, but for everyone else, it was hell.

If prices are going DOWN and innovation is going UP I quite frankly don't give a darn if a monopoly controls one industry absolutely because it's not doing anything harmful but is in fact, by cutting prices, benefiting society. These monopolies did pay their workers very fair wages, Ford Motor Company even went above and beyond and did $5 a day, which motivated other businesses to make that standard practice (remember the dollar was WAY more powerful in those days). I don't care what the elites in the historical and economic think tanks tell me, I care what's true. And you…  Read more forget, dear socialist, that Andrew Carnegie himself rose from being a child labourer born of Scottish Immigrants in a massive city to becoming the richest philantrophist in the land. All these workers could have become Carnegies if they had his determination.

Cutting prices doesn’t necessarily mean benefiting society, in fact, it’s often a method of drawing people in for the long game of extreme amounts of economic control, leading only to control of the government later on and a massive increase in prices out of nowhere if the time is right. If those exist for long, the fun won’t last, and the price suffering comes next. The work that came to make that steel in the first place was grueling and painful, then when they automated, people were laid off en masse and left to suffer with extremely small severance packages, if anything…  Read more at all. When a monopoly happens, if you leave that business, you leave that whole sector, and as such, have no chances of improving anywhere but one place, and monopolies are notorious for crushing small and medium businesses without the slightest thought. That $5 a day wage is barely 44 thousand by todays metrics, and was also an extremely rare and niche wage for that kind of time.

Look, you might like paying more of your hard-earned money for products, but most people prefer to get what they need cheap, so don't force your high prices on them. The only reason small and medium size businesses go out when there's a monopoly is because the monopoly produces the same thing as the smaller businesses CHEAPER and BETTER. Multiple businesses in that industry are not necessary, so it forces those who go out of business to find success in an industry that actually needs more businesses and needs them. Let the people who are most efficient at doing something do it, let the smaller businesses find a different place to innovate and be succesful. All businesses start small.

When the entire industry is dominated, they don’t have anywhere to go unless they changed the entire industry they’re inside. Overtime, monopoly after monopoly stacks up, and then you’ve got a high possibility of an extremely corrupt system of businesses with near god-level amounts of power and governmental influence. By then, you’re in a really bad place, and things being cheap doesn’t make up for it. Our obsession with efficiency, wealth, competition and power are precisely what can take it away from us and put it into the hands of those that are already rich, and that’s why our regulations are extremely important, because businesses are always chomping at the bit to get any minor increase in efficiency, no matter the cost of employees.

Why are you upset that businesses strive to be efficient and profitable? If they can cut employee counts in a certain industry, that means, obviously, those employees are not needed in that certain industry, and would be better used to increase a different industry, which, having been fired, they inevitably will do. These forces of the free market, without any government pulling at the strings, force people to work for what society wants and move economic progress forward.

An EXTREMELY common problem when they’re laid off is that they’ll have a hard time finding a job, poverty is almost a surety when fired. Not to mention, a lot of workers are specialized, not generalized, because the education required to do so is often extensive and expensive, and when they’re kicked out of an industry, they have little to no options leftover. There’s a thousand problems attached to monopolies, and the only thing positive to be named is money and efficiency.

You seem to think the free market is the problem. People are the problem. People are inherently selfish, fallen, and sinful. And it will always be that way. We cannot rewrite the fundamentals of human nature, we cannot forever snuff out poverty and ill-will and turmoil and famine. I believe in the free market, but I understand that though the free market is perfect, under a free market, humans will still do things we might disagree with, and if you believe in liberty you have to be okay with that. Do not let idealism blind you to the fallacies of socialism, do not trade logic and historical knowledge for emotionalism and group thinking. Socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried, and has claimed hundreds of millions of victims, caused dozens of wars, and created famine, suffering, depression, and enslavement for those whom it rules.

Yes, I think people have a desire for their own improvement or gain in one way or another, though that’s never been the whole story. Selfishness triumphs, yes, but that’s not all people want as a whole. They WANT lots of things, power, influence, praise, to make a difference, to work, to see their work visibly benefit, to help people, to make their voices heard, to mask and hide the problems of their past, there’s SO many things we want, but that doesn’t make us bad, it makes us driven to do bad things to GET THERE in the first place. We all want different things, neve…  Read morer once in the history of humanity has a belief or idea been 100% homogeneously agreed upon, whether it be that living is good or that a god exists, or that human nature is good or bad, but we never took the time to address that we cannot and never should be homogenous enough to make one simple statement to describe our nature in the first place. It’s far too complicated to stick us into one category, but here’s a broad statement I’m willing to make: human nature is designed for our self-preservation and to chase what we personally want, either for the good of others or ourselves, thereby, we are neither selfish nor selfless, moral nor immoral, we are malleable and flexible as a species, and as a unit, nearly immovable the more we cement a belief or opinion and more flexible the less we believe in or accept an idea.

Do you have any evidence to speak of that the only people it hurts are the rich? No, you don't, because high taxes hurt the working class, by limiting the amount of money the rich can invest in the economy, thus creating jobs and raises and benefits for the working class in a competitive environment. All of these evidences that high taxation HURTS the poor I have repeatedly brought up to you in other chains of debate, but you merely stopped debating whenever I did because you didn't have a response. Acknowledge these facts...

Alright then, let’s go back to the 50s. At the time, those making 200k (2.5 million today), the tax rate for those above that was over 90%, and job growth remained at a higher level than now. Sure, the rich still tries extremely hard to avoid taxation, meaning most paid about half of that instead. At the time, inequality was lower, the median income was higher, and yet, companies didn’t make nearly as much as before, General Motors being the most profitable and large company at the time, and, adjusting for inflation, they made only about 11 billion, in comparison to the 129 billio…  Read moren that Saudi Aramco made in 2023. Job creation has very little to do with the taxes of the rich as a whole. Rank the top 5 years of job growth for our economy, and they were mostly done during the time of high 75-80% tax rates on the rich, though, few still paid that amount, they pay even less than before by a lot.

First of all, in the 1950s, top income earners had 42% of their earnings stolen from them, not 90%, so I have no idea if you pulled that 90 number out off your butt or got it on some BS left-wing website, but either way, the figures you've presented are more than double what the real numbers were. Secondly, you've used the False Cause Fallacy by taking two bits of information (job growth was higher in the '50s & taxes were at 90%, which I will correct for you to 42%) and attributed the high taxes as a reason for the job growth we saw in the '50s. But, in fact, just lik…  Read moree today, almost none of the jobs that were created in the '50s were new – what we actually saw was the millions of American soldiers coming home and replacing their military jobs with civilian jobs – there was no substantial increase, that was primarily just the military men going home and getting jobs they would have had before. IN fact, it's interesting to note that income taxes had been halved right before the "job growth" you speak of – coincidence? I think not.

I could’ve SWORN I wrote the 42% bit, and yes, I was aware of that part. You also literally used the False Cause Fallacy for your reasoning as well.

Yeah, 90 and 42 have zero digits in common, so I don't think that's likely. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That's also only 5 percent higher than today's taxes. If you're going to accuse me of using the false cause fallacy, you're going to have to explain what the TRUE cause of this prosperity was... be prepared to delve DEEP into history and economics ...