Back in 2010 I was teaching at Cornell in my Pensions class and I was trying to explain to a rather arrogant young graduate student that gathering enough wealth so as not to need to worry about retirement savings per se (i.e. insufficient pension asset accumulation or what is often called unfunded pension liabilities) was a false sense of comfort. My point was that you have to think about the broadest implications of such macro trends not just the micro impact on ourselves. Learning how to surf on top of the next tsunami wave may save you in the moment, but it will not save your world and you will then be surrounded by devastation. There are some prescient and crafty people in the Pacific Palisades right now who had sufficient water reservoirs and fire prevention equipment to save their homes, but who are now going to be spending the next decade in the midst of an unrecognizable world that is nothing like the place they chose to build their impermeable fortresses. The way I put it to that young graduate student was that he couldn’t build his walls high enough to keep out a world gone mad and that having his when others are without might be the most dangerous situation he could create for himself. The next day, back in New York City, the father of another young man who was in that class with me up in Ithaca, approached me and just said with great conviction, “You can’t build your walls high enough!” That was when I knew that I had inadvertently captured an important euphemism.
I have since then found many times to use that expression, not the least of which is in discussion of building walls along the border to keep people out who have less than we have. I also have chosen to live my life in conformity with that expression here on this very hilltop. There is a gated community nearby that I have chosen NOT to live in by virtue of the fact that I try my best to eschew such symbols of elitism and false security. Even on my property I have a very tasteful and large front gate that I could keep closed, opening it remotely whenever I wanted to go in or out and using the intercom to admit visitors. From the day I bought the place, I have always left that gate in the permanent open position with the thought that it would likely not prevent anyone who really wanted to get in from getting in and was therefore more symbolic of something with which I simply do not agree.
I understand the concept of deterrence and I get it that walls do direct people and critters to not roam freely across boundaries, giving those in charge the time to properly keep whatever is being protected safe. And I also understand and appreciate the concept of private property. I watched Doctor Zhivago when the harsh Bolsheviks pushed into the Zhivago residence in Moscow and demanded to house ten comrade families in the luxury previously occupied by the Zhivago family alone. I get it and I have been raised in a capitalist culture that believes that communism is worse for everyone. But part of that culture was always staunchly supported on either end by two important pillars. The first was the Rule of Law that went beyond just property rights and included human rights. You had to play by the rules and there was built-in oversight and policing that kept everyone in line to adhere to societal norms, which were regularly tweaked and adjusted (as well as tested in the courts) to reflect current realities. The second pillar is an ethical pillar which is best distilled down to a Good Samaritan or Golden Rule that establishes the importance of caring about our fellow man and, indeed, the natural world.
Among the biggest problems I see right now is that Trump is working very hard to dismantle both of those pillars simultaneously and not recognizing their importance to a properly functioning and balanced capitalistic state. I use the term “balanced” with specificity intention. It’s relatively easy to create an autocratic system that pretends to be capitalistic in its economic mode of operation, but what you have likely really created is a kleptocracy and not a capitalistic democracy. An oligarchy is the preliminary stage of extreme kleptocracy and still has tenets of capitalism, but if left unchecked by some form of those two pillars, it quickly devolves into pure kleptocracy where the riches flow only to the mighty. To have a properly functioning form of capitalism, there needs to be a degree of freedom to markets that is more blindly egalitarian than most oligarchies and all kleptocracies cannot tolerate. Free markets always sound like the cry of the wannabe oligarchs, but in reality, oligarchs want the exact opposite of free markets. They want rigged markets that work in their favor. There are very few billionaires (my proxy for American oligarchs) who don’t understand the importance of rigged markets to their continued prosperity and dominance.
It is very shocking that Trump is being allowed to remove all the guardrails and safeguards that we have built into our capitalistic system over the last century. He is removing standards for cabinet-level people. He is removing inspector generals in all the agencies. He is eliminating watchdog capabilities. He is discouraging whistleblowing. He is removing strong and often quite conservative prosecutors. He is dismissing entire segments of our intelligence and law enforcement system by firing thousands of career FBI agents. He is pardoning convicted criminals (not entirely surprising since he is a convicted criminal) and terminating investigations of suspected criminals (i.e. Mayor Eric Adams). And he is even eliminating the ethical foundation of how America does business by trying to wipe away the foreign corrupt practices act. There goes pillar number one. As for pillar number two, his actions through DOGE that are ruthlessly eliminating aid and support programs both foreign and domestic means that he is trying to eliminate the welfare state that has been the foundation of our national character over the past century. Of course this is all being done in the name of economizing and reduction of waste, graft and corruption. What the combined effect does is merely shift waste, graft and corruption from one place to another and indeed ratchets it up tremendously as befitting the scale desired by the oligarchs to move their needles.
The thing about this strategy of extreme and efficient greed is that it ignores the ultimate evolutionary repercussions. The Nazis understood that slapping down the Jews was not something they could do without repercussions unless they found that heinous but cauterizing ultimate solution. Trump still thinks everyone is going to love him and his program once they see it in full view…or that by then he will have what he wants and it won’t matter what they think. Hitler wanted to build his walls while being sure there was no one left to scale those walls. Trump will eventually realize that the walls he wants to build need to be higher and higher unless he handles the outside world in some way that they do not see the need to scale the walls. So now he has come up with the brilliant idea to make the citizenry the beneficiaries of the DOGE efforts by making distributions to the public. While this does not help the deficit, that was never Trump’s concern (remember, he has learned through six bankruptcies that debt is only an obligation if you have to actually pay it back). What it does do is create a sense of credibility for the DOGE effort (who will think to audit the DOGE wins if they are getting apiece of the action) and it will make Trump the people’s champion. It worked for Evita didn’t it? So, maybe Trump has learned how to build his walls high enough…at least for a little while longer.