“Who runs the country?”

I’ve been hearing variants of that question a lot over the last  few weeks, mainly in forms like “given Joe Biden’s age and apparent mental decline, can we trust him to run the country for another four years?”

For the last eight or nine years, I’ve also heard it a lot, in slightly different forms, about Donald Trump.

I visited Google Trends to find out if I’m just imagining increased frequency of that annoying question. Turns out my perception is correct: After a brief spike in 2004, the phrase “who runs the country” took a long vacation, only beginning to rise to prominence again a decade or so ago, and recently peaking at its highest point since 2015.

It’s a really dumb question … and a pet peeve of mine.

Donald Trump did not “run the country” from 2017 to 2021.

Nor has Joe Biden “run the country” since then.

Whoever wins this November’s presidential election will not “run the country” starting next January 20.

What are you doing today?

Whatever that might be, did you ask Joe Biden for permission to do it? Next January, will you start running your daily calendar by Joe Biden or Donald Trump for approval?

Almost certainly not.

The president is just one of more than 330 million Americans. He (or, someday, she) may be more powerful than most of us, But not so much more powerful that he “runs the country” in any meaningful sense.

At MOST, the president “runs” one of three branches of the federal government … and the federal government is not “the country.”

Economics isn’t everything, but it’s a useful thing. US Gross Domestic Product (the value of all goods and services produced) in 2023 topped $27 trillion, of which the federal government spent $6.13 trillion. That’s a lot. It’s WAY too much. But it’s hardly “running the country.”

That $6.13 trillion was appropriated by Congress, not the president.

His only power over that is to sign or veto the appropriations bills (in the latter case, Congress can override him), then spend the money as Congress directs.

Increasingly “imperial” presidents since World War 2 have tried to get around such strictures with “executive orders.” Sometimes that works. Other times Congress or the courts say “nope.”

Outside the purely economic arena, the president gets to negotiate treaties (but the Senate must approve them) and act as commander in chief of the armed forces when they are “called into the service of the United States,” which should only happen when Congress has declared war (it hasn’t done so in 80 years).

The president doesn’t “run the country.” He only “runs the government” to a limited extent, if Congress and the courts allow it (they allow it far too much).

The country is “run” by those of us who produce that $27 trillion in goods and services every year … or don’t .. and who go about our business with or without a president’s permission.

We should stop fantasizing so much power into the hands of politicians. They’re just wasteful parasites. We’re the productive hosts.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

“Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing” feels like a current headline eight years after it ran in Politico.  Is America trapped in a rerun of the Republican Revolution of ’94, with the platforms of “presidential candidates Buchanan, David Duke and Ross Perot — the most visible figures of the political fringe” perpetually mainstreamed? The New York Times Book Review‘s Jennifer Szalai is convinced (“Ticking Time Bomb,” June 30). Or in one of the ’80s, “When Greed Was Good” — Jacob Goldstein’s headline on the facing page of the Book Review.

Goldstein writes that the cultural catchet of financial flummery made “the United States suddenly fall in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed,” suggesting Billy Joel-style verses about the likes of “Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose,’ Jane Fonda, running shoes.” At the time, Mother Jones quipped that the rock star “ain’t ‘livin’ here in Allentown'” after “marryin’ a … fashion model.” Nowadays, an ode to Air Jordan marketing from Matt Damon, previously known for plugging Howard Zinn’s People’s History, raises few eyebrows.

The line from Gekko to Gingrich needs little elaboration when Szalai places the sociopolitical rancor of the early 1990s “atop a wreckage of junk bonds, bank failures and vacant skyscrapers” of “the debt-fueled growth of the ’80s.”  While Friedman was civil enough in his limited-government sentiments to be a PBS host, Szalai finds one of the most vocal supporters of Buchanan’s 1992 campaign in “the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard” who considered George Herbert Walker Bush’s re-election bid “too timid and polite.”

Szalai traces Rothbard’s “taste for conflict” to his juvenile insistence that “Communist aunts and uncles” were too harsh on Francisco Franco’s repressive rightist regime in Spain. Yet Rothbard’s pugnaciousness led him to positions unhinted at by Szalai’s selections. In 1988, he advocated voting for Democratic “cautious spender” Michael Dukakis since Bush was providing “only lip service to the free market.” His Libertarian Forum berated Friedman for providing “a free-market cloak for state despotism” in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and recommended an “angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class” by Noam Chomsky.

Buchanan offered meager warmth to his libertarian bedfellows, who he said “don’t know anything about American history” when Rothbard’s publications identifying the ills of intervention included four volumes on the Revolutionary period alone. Llewelyn Rockwell recalled that by 1995, Rothbard could see that Buchanan’s “commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state;” by 2002, hostility to international comity ranged from the Buchanan who “hates China and the developing world” to a President George Bush who “hates the Muslim world” (Rockwell would sum up his administration as “red-state fascism”).

Goldstein notes that Trump’s first presidential term ended with a release of the Michael Milken who personified “the ’80s financialization wave” from boom to bust; the Trump of 1989 drew Rothbard’s mockery for calling Milken overpaid “from his own lofty financial perch.” Real competition in business and political economy would cut Trump’s towering shadow down to size.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 4, 2024
2. “SCHLOSBERG COLUMN: When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, July 5, 2024

Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both old men. We already knew that.

Neither’s brain can be honestly characterized as hitting on all the key cognitive cylinders. We already knew that.

They’re both compulsive liars. We already knew that.

Did listening to the two geezers argue about their golf handicaps in CNN’s June 27 “presidential debate” tell us anything we didn’t already know about them? Nah.

On the particular night in question, Biden came off as more dazed/confused and Trump as more fever-dreamy/hallucinatory but in any given week we can expect each of them to display characteristics of both mental status sets.

They’re both decrepit. They’re both deranged. They’re both demented. They’re both dishonest. Neither adds up (or seems to have ever previously added up) to much beyond the sum of those characteristics.

Even if  someone, anyone, could plausibly be “qualified” to “serve” as President of the United States, neither of these two would come close to making the list. If sanity, competence, and morals were the criteria, we’d be safer picking a random name from the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane’s patient roster than choosing between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looks at it, we don’t have to worry about “qualifications” — because it’s impossible for anyone to be “qualified.”

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Abraham Lincoln: “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

In 2020, only about 47% of Americans voted for president of the United States.

About 90 million  weren’t allowed to vote. How can they have been said to have “consented” to be ruled by the winner?

Another 82 million chose not to vote. How can they be said to have “consented” to be ruled by the winner?

As for the 158.5 million Americans who DID vote, they hardly displayed unanimity. Can those who voted for Donald Trump, Jo Jorgensen, Howie Hawkins, et al. really be said to have “consented” to be ruled by Joe Biden?

Biden only knocked down 51.31% of votes actually cast … and because so many Americans chose not to vote or were forbidden to vote, fewer than one in four Americans could plausibly be said to have “consented” to his rule.

This time around, instead of arguing over which incompetent liar should rule us, let’s start thinking about how to do away with a system that allows anyone to rule us at all.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY