It's a complete admission that privatization is worse than public investment. It's the largest condemnation of neoliberalism that I have ever heard from a world leader. It's also probably the most accurate thing Trump has ever said. It is ABSOLUTELY cheating when you can build goods services and infrastructure at cost without needing to skim ever increasing amounts of profit off the top, and that's why EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD SHOULD DO IT. Why is the entire Western world completely and totally committed to doing things the hard way when even Trump clearly understands that public investment is better?
Public investment gives countries an edge, an edge the US no longer has because we refuse to do any public investment whatsoever. So yeah it's totally "cheating". SO DO IT. Go cheat. Use all the money the US has to do heaps of public investment and keep American economic hegemony for decades to come.
Or, you know, just take your ball and go home because the rest of the world has figured out that governments can actually invest in their countries and that's "cheating."
Trump basically just agreeing with Marxist observations about how goods and services are produced, and then coming to the most hilarious wrong conclusion around what to do about it is peak American neoliberalism and I can't stop thinking about it and laughing about it.
Anyway that's it that's the post.
spoiler
something rattling around in my head like a marble lately is how disengenuous but often repeated it is that "American labor is expensive" when so much of the cost of social reproduction of labor in the states is bullshit ass fucking landlordism.
if social housing wasn't illegal here and was, instead, well provisioned for, that's probably like anywhere from 30%-50% of costs for some people. just money going straight from whatever wage someone makes for doing something, transmuted immediately into a landlord's equity... for doing nothing!
that's not even getting into the fucked ass situation with healthcare provisioning, insurance profiteering, etc, which are also huge drivers of social reproduction costs for American labor... but never actually realized by the laborer.
anyway, when I read or see that frame of American labor being expensive, it pisses me off because the laborer is the victim of that process, not the beneficiary. the capitalist who inserts themselves between the laborer and the provisioning of their necessities is the king of the assholes, and it's the newspapers they own framing the lazy, entitled, fat cat worker benefitting from this arrangement because their wage is so high these days.
The American economy from the perspective of the worker is like that one long shot in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta is just handing out 20s to every person he sees between the door and his table, but in reverse. You draw your paycheck and suddenly a million
line up to take it from you