As a company founder and executive, I found President Trump’s recent speech, and his consistent White House communications, to be “straight down the center of the fairway” concerning American priorities.

What are those priorities?  Business.

As Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell has said, “business is where wealth is created.  It is the economic engine that makes all other things possible.”  This seems a basic fact that the progressive left, and even parts of the GOP, still do not understand, appreciate, or fully recognize: Americans are at their best when they are inventing, building, working, and raising a family.  President Trump understands that.

The political left may claim that its “green energy” program reflected leftists’ understanding of economic innovation.  But they got it all wrong: Their model is not a free market, but a command economy.  Command economies misallocate resources, including especially money, because they don’t understand the marketplace.

In America, we do markets and competition.  We don’t do socialism.  Socialism doesn’t work in our constitutional order, and in our culture, or even in our vast geography, which is expanding.  You might argue that socialism doesn’t work at all, unless perhaps you’re Sweden or China, and we are neither.

The beauty of markets is that they are “bottom-up” activities that have local knowledge and know-how.  Markets are not perfect, but even when they fail, they provide learning and information for an immediate correction.  Government, by comparison, cannot pivot quickly, if at all, and wastes time and resources.

None of this means that there is no practical role for government.  But like efficient or “lean” business, our government must also be lean and efficient.  That pragmatic approach, borrowed from business management, is what President Trump has clearly signaled.

As he recently stated, there is apparently nothing he can say that will get the other political party to cross the aisle in a united commitment to American priorities.  Competition, including political competition, works when two or more groups are acting in good faith at solving an actual problem and providing solutions.  The currents Dems do neither.

When that happens, the bad actor is forced by the market to exit.  University of Chicago economist Lester G. Telser called this problem the “core of the market.”  It applies to politics as well.  It means that the key thing that makes any market successful is a combination of competition and cooperation.  Some cooperation is necessary, because it better serves the market’s members: consumers, suppliers, employees, owners, and voting citizens.  It’s especially critical when there are tough problems to solve and big opportunities to pursue, which require all hands on deck. 

President Trump understands that as a businessman.  His opponents will either join the political market in good faith, working constructively toward American interests and opportunity, or be forced to exit that market by voters who are increasingly pragmatic.

Matthew G. Andersson is a business founder and former CEO, a jet command pilot and graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  He was an executive adviser in aerospace and defense with Booz Allen Hamilton and testified before the U.S. Senate on new aviation technology.  He is the author of The New Airline Code, concerning aviation economics and policy.  He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time Magazine.  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.