Defeating The Greater Lawlessness

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The Republicans’ hunger for power has now reached such a point that they have selected and continue to support a president who has lied and cheated his whole adult life; from Trump Casinos to Trump Towers, from stiffing bankers and his workers to cooking the books.” H Green/Huffington Post

NYTimes

We knew as long ago as Nixon’s Watergate that the Republican Party harbored a lawless tendency when it suited them. Why else would President Reagan engineer the illicit Iran contra arms deal with Khomeini, or President GW Bush invade Iraq when UN inspectors already knew Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction a decade earlier, I said in 2017?

Now we have illegal tariffs and an unpopular war with Iran, one that will drive inflation even higher and might take years to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target to fulfill its mandate of full employment with stable prices.

The result? Another recession, sooner or later, as happened during Presidents Reagan (2) and GW Bush terms. In Bush’s case, he managed to turn four years of Clinton budget surpluses (1996-2000) that could have kept social security and Medicare solvent for decades into a worldwide Great Recession (2008-09), the worst since the Great Depression, according to most economists.

President Trump’s Republicans are following the same path with his huge tax cuts while borrowing $trillions to fight his wars, cutting public services to the bone and closing whole departments by firing more than 300,000 federal employees.

Republicans have doubled down on their lawlessness by allowing his illegal wars and tariffs, and maybe what could precipitate the next recession; their determination to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible without allowing them due process or a legal pathway to citizenship.

Immigrants are taxpayers that add workers to our shrinking population, and their loss is depriving our economy of essential services—agricultural workers that supply our groceries, for starters, but also a large part of construction, healthcare, transportation and lower paying service workers in leisure and hospitality.

This can only be done because Trump’s Republicans either ignore or disregard the civil laws, as well as economic laws, and even the constitution in their hunger for power. This is impoverishing more Americans, not to speak of turning a blind eye to the illegal enrichment of the Trump family and their supporters.

What can be done to return the $trillions in wealth and power that Republicans have taken away from the American people via their massive tax cuts to corporations and wars that were never paid and ignore the most basic rules of capitalist enterprise, such as debts must be paid, contracts and treaties honored?

The sad fact is that the Iran war wasn’t necessary because President Obama had already negotiated a nuclear arms agreement with Iran and Trump’s tariffs have been mostly based on ignorance of foreign trade tradeoffs, not unfair trade practices.

The history of greater lawlessness and hunger for more power is leading to a massive disruption in foreign trade which is the life blood of the world’s economies. It is repeating the mistakes that choked off world trade in 1930 and led to the Great Depression.

The question is how much longer will consumers and voters tolerate the record of Republicans’ failures that have led to four recessions just since 1980 that were the result of their hunger for more power?

Polls are showing that ordinary Americans are beginning to understand what it means.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why Nations Fail

 Popular Economics Weekly

Amazon

The Nobel memorial prize in economics was awarded Monday to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for research that explains why societies with poor rule of law and exploitative institutions do not generate sustainable growth, as with some U.S. states as well.

Whereas the peoples of more democratic countries with institutions answerable to their citizens are more prosperous than those with weak democratic institutions, such as North Korea, Mexico, Russia, and even China, say the authors of Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, two of the new Suth Nobel Laureates.

“Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

The authors use the example of the twin cities of Nogales, Texas and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Anyone driving across the border can see the difference. Nogales, Texas has three times the income level, better roads, schools, and better law enforcement to protect its citizens than Nogales, Sonora that has been ruled by drug cartels.

The contrast between North and South Korea is even greater—a prosperous South Korean government elected by its citizens vs. a North Korean dictatorship that has literally starved its people to keep one family in power.

It’s also a devastating analysis of why we have a partisan divide between red vs. blue states that Republican Parties have been able to capitalize on by falsely rationalizing the reason for their differences; especially economic rationalizations.

It is a case of the exploiters—wealthy individuals who don’t like to share their wealth—blaming a Washington elite that has dominated most government institutions since World War Two.

The truth is Republican Party economic programs have performed badly; causing massive deficits from tax cuts without concomitant growth that would pay for the tax cuts that have made the red states they govern poorer; because Republicans have adopted policies designed to weaken governmental institutions that are protected by the rule of law.

Republicans began to actually break laws with President Nixon’s Watergate break-in, President Reagan’s secret Iran-contra weapon shipment to Khomeini’s Iran, and GW Bush’s fabrications about Sadam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion of Iraq.

It has culminated with Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s outright contempt of laws and even the constitution in not accepting its loss to Democrats and Joe Biden in 2020.

This is born out in the major thesis of this year’s Nobel Prize-winners: that so-called illiberal democracies with central governments only answerable to a powerful minority rather than a majority of its citizens have performed poorly.

Georgetown Public Policy Review

A Georgetown Public Review measured the different median household incomes of red and blue states in the U.S.--$74,000 in blue states vs. $60,000 in red states. It’s in part because most red states have lower minimum wages, and fewer social services such as healthcare for their citizens. And even those social services are mostly subsidized by the federal government.

It is why democracies work best when they follow economic rules that serve the majority, and most in danger when attempts are made to weaken or discredit their institutions. The choice for Americans in the upcoming Presidential election should be clear—belong to a party and vote for a country that works for all of its citizens.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen